Jurassic Park - No More Sheep
by Calculonius
Summary: We saw dinosaurs using their advantages, now lets see humans using theirs. What happens if the humans remember that intelligence and tool-use are bigger advantages than size, strength, speed, big claws and sharp teeth? Here I add a detail about Dr Grant's past & see what could happen.
1. Chapter 1

Jurassic Park - no more sheep

º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`

Chapter 1

Author's Note

The movie and the book disagree in several details. For example, in the movie the lawyer dies and the mathematician lives. In the book it's the reverse - the mathematician dies and the lawyer lives.

And the 2 disagree greatly about the size of Dilophosaurs (though you could possibly write that off to being different varieties or sub-species - like great danes vs chihuahuas).

This story is about the movie version - when they conflict, I use the movie version instead of the book. I used the book only to fill in any missing details which I found interesting or useful.

º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`

Doctor Alan Grant sighed in relief as he saw Doctor Ellie Sattler standing by the door to the emergency bunker near the visitor's center at Jurassic Park.

He'd been worried about her, after everything went wrong with the park and the dinosaurs got out.

He and two kids, Lex and Tim - the grandchildren of the man who'd founded the park, John Hammond - had spent all night fleeing from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which had started the night by eating a lawyer named Gennaro.

Alan and the kids had only just now reached the visitor's center, where Dr Grant left them - in the dining room - to snack while he looked for everybody else.

He'd thought this area would be safe, or he wouldn't have left the kids alone.

But as Ellie turned, he saw that she was holding a machete.

He knew Ellie hated weapons, so that was a very bad sign indeed.

He hurried forward, and they had a joyful reunion. Then each hurried to tell the other about everything that had happened.

Ellie and the group at the visitor's center had had their own problems, not least of which was being hunted by Velociraptors.

Ellie told him how she and Robert Muldoon the hunter had started out to go to the 'maintenance shed' - really a complex and permanent building rather than just a shed - to restore power, but had turned back when Muldoon had noticed that Raptors were hunting them, and Ellie had explained to Muldoon how Raptors hunt - in packs, surrounding their prey and attacking from unexpected directions.

Until she told him that, Muldoon had been inclined to go off to hunt the Raptors, but the information had changed his mind.

One man alone can't counter such tactics.

So he and Ellie had returned to the bunker to try to convince Hammond to come with them, so the 3 could watch all directions at once.

That hadn't worked out well - Hammond didn't want to go hunting. So while Hammond was thinking it over, Ellie and Muldoon had waited outside the bunker, hoping to lure a Raptor into showing itself so that Muldoon, hiding above the door, could shoot it.

They hadn't been there long when Grant walked up, unaware of the danger of Raptors running loose.

At this point Grant and Ellie walked into the bunker, followed, unnoticed by Muldoon.

Within seconds of Grant having entered the bunker, he saw the open cabinet full of weapons and exclaimed:

"Wait, you have guns here? Oh Yeah! We're done pretending to be sheep now: bleating in fear & fleeing helplessly is over! It's time to show dinosaurs why tigers and bears fear US & not the other way around! We just changed who's the hunter and who's the hunted."

Ellie frowned. She hated guns and had debated that with Alan often before.

He had put himself through college by joining the National Guard and letting them pay his tuition. So he saw guns merely as useful tools rather than as some kind of incarnation of evil as some folks did.

But, if ever there was a need for such a tool, it was now.

The fact that Ellie said nothing suggested she saw the need too.

Alan hurried forwards and helped himself to a weapon.

"A Franchi Spas-12 military shotgun - just the thing!" He gleefully exclaimed, as he loaded it with 9 slugs and filled his pockets with more.

He started to turn back to the entrance - they needed to hurry to rescue the kids - when he paused.

"Grenades?" He said, in curiosity, as he pulled one grenade out of the carton in the bottom of the cabinet and examined it. "Ah, I see - a flash-bang grenade. Yes, that would be very useful against ambush hunters like Raptors. When in doubt, stun everything in the room first!" He smiled as he took a couple grenades & then asked, "But what wise guy put Jurassic Park logo stickers on them?"

Muldoon was the likely culprit, but instead of talking about the stickers, he quickly worked out a plan of attack with Alan and Ellie.

Then they left the emergency bunker, and headed for the visitor's center to rescue the kids.

Alan was in the lead, with Ellie to his right watching that side, and Muldoon to his left watching the left and rear.

Alan and Muldoon each had shotguns, but Ellie was armed only with her machete. It was all she could make herself carry.

On the way, they planned strategies for how best to proceed.

They entered the visitor's center dining room just as the kitchen door opened and both kids ran out, obviously terrified.

The kids ran straight for Doctor Grant, but hadn't even reached him yet before a Raptor came out the same door and gave chase.

Grant's gun spoke once and the raptor fell in its tracks - a one ounce lead slug had entered its skull right between its eyes.

The animal twitched and lay still, while scrambling sounds were heard from the kitchen, as the other Raptors fled the danger which they didn't understand - they didn't know what had killed the first one, or how, but they had heard it screech as it died.

Grant worked the shotgun's pump-action to clear the round the next round, which had jammed. The Spas-12 normally re-loaded itself, but that method was prone to jam in shotguns, so this design included a pump action, which quickly and easily cleared most types of jams.

He calmly commented:

"Before I joined the military, my friends took me hunting once. I was a hopelessly bad shot. I couldn't even hit a man-sized target at 20 feet - 4 shots were all at least a foot apart from each-other. Later that same trip, I gave up when I couldn't figure out how to clear my gun when it jammed. The military trained all that out of me."

Though the comments were not welcoming and reassuring in the standard way, nevertheless they had a profoundly reassuring effect on the whole group.

They dispelled the helpless feeling they'd all struggled with for almost a full day since the dinosaurs got out.

Muldoon tossed a flash-bang grenade into the kitchen.

The terrific noise and dazzling light it made were blocked by the kitchen door, so they didn't harm the humans, who'd covered their ears and eyes anyway, just in case.

Then, as soon as it had gone off, Muldoon rushed into the kitchen.

But the other raptors had already left.

Rather than spend time hunting them, they escorted the kids back to the emergency bunker.

It's door was sturdy enough to keep them safe from anything small enough to get through it.

On the way, Doctor Grant attempted to comfort the kids again, saying, "Don't worry kids, you're safe now."

"But they're dinosaurs!" Tim exclaimed.

"So?" Alan asked.

"They're really really tough." Tim persisted.

"Are they made of steel?" Alan pressed.

"No." Tim admitted.

"Even if they were," Alan said, "we've got tools that can take care of them anyway. An elephant's hide - at its thickest - is 2-3 centimeters thick, but a .308 armor piercing round - which we have some of back in the emergency bunker - can penetrate that much steel. And I guarantee you, any kind of hide is a whole lot weaker than steel.

So relax. Yes, a dinosaurs' capacity to do violence is great, but ours is much much greater. And the humans just went back on offense in this game."

When they got back to the bunker, they reloaded and prepared to head back out, to go to the maintenance shed and restore power.

Before they left, Ian Malcolm who had been wounded in the first T-Rex attack and later brought back to the bunker, declared:

"You think you've got it all under control now, but that's all an illusion. Chaos theory says you can't predict what these animals will do. You can't control nature!"

The mathematician had frequently expressed such thoughts.

Now Doctor Grant took a moment to respond.

"You keep going on and on about predictability, and implying that, if something can't be proven to be safe, that's the same thing as proving it is unsafe.

It isn't the same.

We've been humoring you, since I don't like to dismiss a man's entire profession, but it is the purest conceit and self-deception to think that predictability is necessary. It's nice when we can get it, but certainly not a pre-condition for everything.

Your implication that unpredictability effectively guarantees failure and should prevent us from going down a certain path, is simply wrong.

Consider your own example of the weather being unpredictable - does that mean that nobody should ever fly in airplanes, because several types of weather - which we can't predict - could knock the plane out of the sky and kill all aboard it?

Of course not.

We do what we can to make planes safe, then accept the remaining risk because planes are so useful, and fly anyway.

It's the same thing with boats - unpredictable weather can take them out too.

And people still build houses in hurricane zones - they know the risk, but take what steps they can and then judge that the benefits outweigh the remaining risk.

It's the same thing with people who live near earthquake faults or sites of possible volcanic activity.

In fact, all of life is risk.

You can't even drive your car to work in the morning without the possibility of having a fatal accident - it's unpredictable. But we do what we can and move on. Manufacturers build cars with things like crumple zones, to try to protect the passengers. And we use airbags and seat-belts and such to minimize the risk as much as we can. Then we drive anyway - despite the unpredictability of deadly accidents - because we judge the benefits to be worth the risk.

So the fact that we can't predict dinosaur behavior is not as important as you think it is.

Certain relevant things - like any given dinosaur's maximum muscle power and bite strength - can be measured and learned fairly quickly and taken into account, reducing the chance of disasters like this happening again.

What's more, that unpredictability will steadily reduce in proportion to how much we learn about them. As our experience with them grows, our risk goes down.

The genie is out of the bottle, so to speak - we can't uninvent them or wish them away now. So we may as well make the best of things and learn about them. A few minutes ago I learned that what happens to a dinosaur when you shoot it, is the same thing that happens when you shoot tigers, bears and other large predators.

I'm going to go learn some more now."

Malcolm was, for once, silent, as Alan, Ellie, and Muldoon left for the maintenance shed.

They got there in safety and started following the directions radioed to them by Hammond.

Down a flight of steps they came to a cage made of metal mesh.

Inside the cage, were the circuit breakers.

As Ellie turned them on one by one, Muldoon and Grant stood guard, watching different paths by which raptors might approach.

Just as Ellie turned on the last circuit breaker, they were all surprised by a raptor suddenly thrusting its head past some thick cables to try to bite Ellie.

Nobody had expected any Raptor to be able to attack from that direction.

But Ellie had reacted fast. Resetting the circuit breakers had only taken one hand & she'd kept the machete in her other hand.

So she quickly stabbed at the Raptor, who was temporarily trapped by the thick cables.

The machete went deep into the Raptor's neck, causing the beast to immediately pull back and try to dislodge the embedded machete by whipping its head around.

But it couldn't pull back far enough to get free of the blade, and the rapid twisting it was doing to try to dislodge the blade ended up making the blade cut the beast's neck severely, as its own frantic strength made it saw back and forth.

Desperate and furious, it tried to bite its attacker, but mistook and bit the long blade instead, perhaps thinking, in it's violent rage, that it was an arm.

In any case, the blade sank deep into the Raptor's lower jaw, causing it a whole new source of distress and adding to its frenzy.

While this was happening, the 3 humans scrambled out of the cage, and away from the Raptor, as fast as they could.

Once they were out, and the cage latched closed, Grant and Muldoon turned to shoot the beast.

All they could see was the head, and it was madly whipping back and forth, so it took them a moment to aim, since they wanted to be sure not to hit the electrical equipment.

But before they got a good clear shot, the beast was dead. The Raptor's equivalent of the carotid artery and jugular vein had both been severed, and it took mere seconds to bleed out and die.

Turning to go back, they discovered the remains of Mister Arnold, the system engineer, who had apparently run into the same Raptor when he came to turn on the power.

That added to the angst they felt from the sudden attack.

After taking a moment to collect themselves, they set off to the emergency bunker.

They needed someone to who knew how to turn the computers back on, and Grant remembered Lex talking a lot about computers.

She may not be familiar with this type, but they hoped she could figure it out.

Lex was very reluctant to go, but understood the need, and she found the company of three armed adults reassuring.

So they went, with Alan, Ellie and Muldoon each watching a sector as before, and Lex in the middle.

At the visitor center's front doors they paused long enough to use a flash-bang grenade.

Nobody wanted to simply open a door and just walk through, hoping that a raptor wasn't lurking on the other side.

So they tossed in a grenade first. It did no real damage but rather made a tremendously loud concussive sound and a dazzling flash - sufficient to stun and temporarily blind anything on the other side.

Then they hurried through, confident that any lurking predator would be disabled - at least briefly - and so unable to hurt them. If there had been a predator, they'd have made to sure to kill it before it recovered - they had no time or spare resources for niceties like capturing the animal.

But nothing was there.

So they hurried to the control room.

Lex sat at the computer while Alan, Ellie and Muldoon watched - in different directions - for the approach of any threats.

When it appeared, it was sudden and silent. A Velociraptor stealthily moved it's head up to the window in the room's door, then instantly rammed the door when it saw prey within.

Ellie had been guarding the door, and braced herself against it as soon she saw the Raptor - just before the door got rammed.

The impact knocked her down, but the Raptor didn't get in on that first try.

It didn't get to make a second attempt.

Doctor Grant and Muldoon both shot at once, and each hit the Raptor in the head.

The results demonstrated that nothing that's roughly human-sized and made of flesh and bone could resist 12-gauge slugs.

Alan commented: "They run like cheetahs, jump like grasshoppers, think like chimpanzees, organize hunts like wolves, are as strong as apes, have an amazingly powerful bite like crocodiles, and are literally armed to the teeth - festooned with claws & such. It's almost like somebody made them up for a story where he wanted a super-monster. But regardless - they are not bulletproof like SuperMan - their skulls are no thicker than average for their size, so a 12-gauge slug still goes right through, even though, for its class, a 12-gauge has relatively poor penetration."

Ellie, ever an opponent of guns even when they'd just saved her life, ignored the comment and said "You know, we should definitely dissect that - think of all the things we could learn..."

"Definitely", Alan agreed, then asked "You guys ok with a little mess?"

Lex was buried in the computer, working on figuring it out and didn't respond.

Muldoon shrugged - as a hunter he'd long since gotten used to seeing an animal's innards. He confirmed that all 3 Raptors were now dead, so that vigilance could be safely relaxed a bit. But still he came out to stand guard while Alan and Ellie worked.

He ignored their constant stream of technical comments and scientific jargon, but he did get them to cut out a steak for him - he wanted to try Raptor.

Alan and Ellie were so involved in the dissection that they didn't notice when Lex got the power back on - not until she jumped up in excited celebration.

They congratulated her, then got back to work, as did she - there were still plenty of things in the computer to figure out and turn back on.

Lex did fit in a call to her Grandfather in the emergency bunker to tell him how things were going. He said he'd call for a helicopter ambulance for Ian Malcolm and then make some other calls.

After a long time, they all finished and went back to the emergency bunker to get Malcolm ready to be transported off the island - he was in urgent need of a hospital.

The ambulance Helicopter came with a pilot and 2 medics, and between them and Malcolm's stretcher, it would be full.

Malcolm's stretcher had only been moved halfway from the jeep to the helicopter when the Tyrannosaur attacked.

It saw the humans, bellowed, then charged from the woods where it had been concealed.

While most of the humans bleated in fear and fled, Alan calmly shouldered his shotgun, and took careful aim while asking, "Do you know why, when they hunt grizzly bears, some experienced hunters take 12-gauge shotguns, even though they can't penetrate to the animal's innards and kill it?"

He fired and the T-Rex went down.

"That's why. It can't kill it, but it can really impair its ability to chase you around the parking lot. With a grizzly, a 12-gauge slug can break its hip. With a T-Rex, it can disable its knee, as we've just seen. That's a big powerful animal, but here we use his 8 tons of weight against him."

The T-Rex made a pathetic attempt to crawl to them, but made no progress. It bellowed in pain and anger.

"See," Alan said, ", to walk or run, it has to balance its tremendous weight on one leg or the other - each taking the whole load briefly. It's legs are set too far apart for it to have any chance to balance on just one, and it has no hope of ever hopping. So with one knee disabled, it can only lie there and wiggle a bit. I don't know if the slug broke a bone, or just did soft tissue damage. So I'll stand guard on it in case it's able to get up again soon, and you folks finish loading Malcolm and then bring tranquilizer guns or whatever you normally use for when you need to get big dangerous animals moved from one place to another."

There was still a lot of consternation and fear among the group, but they gradually sorted it out and got moving.

Soon the helicopter was taking off and Muldoon and the others were off to get tranquilizer guns and equipment.

With the park's systems back online and the T-Rex disabled, Hammond felt confident enough to call his construction workers, maintenance crews and others to get on the boat and come back to the island. They'd been sent to the mainland in advance of the storm, for safety from it, just in case.

The dinosaurs had only broken 3 sections of fence, which would be fairly minor as repairs go - the storm damage was worse, but would still be less than a full day's work to repair.

The computer operators who had been Mister Arnold's assistants would have a lot more work waiting for them - everything Dennis Nedry had done would need to be checked over in case he'd done any more sabotage, plus there were still bugs to fix.

Tranquilizing the T-Rex was straightforward and went smoothly. They put restraints on it just in case, but didn't bother trying to move it back to its paddock. That would be pointless, at least until the maintenance crews got back and repaired the fences.

While Hammond, greatly assisted by Muldoon worked on getting his park back in shape, Grant and Ellie did what they do best - study dinosaurs. That was so much easier with fresh dinosaurs than with ancient bones that it would be hard to get them to leave.

The kids slept off their traumatic experience right up until another helicopter arrived to take them home. Then they sleepily waved goodbye, boarded the helicopter and went right back to sleep on it.

Alan and Ellie were in the midst of another Raptor dissection when John Hammond approached and asked,

"Doctors Grant and Sattler, do you think my park can be made safe?"

Then he added, in a much quieter voice "I almost lost my grandkids."

Doctor Grant didn't even hesitate: "Yes mister Hammond I do. Dinosaurs are physically formidable, but there's nothing magical about that. Humans have dealt with all kinds of physically formidable animals since the dawn of time, and we consistently come out on top.

Take a bull as a simple example. Bulls are mean, they're tough, they're fast, they're big, they're strong... they're dinner. Why? Because we're intelligent tool users who think they taste good.

A bull can easily kill a man, but how often do you quail in fear before your hamburger or steak?

With that said, I should point out that it would be foolish to continue without adequate safeguards - even safeguards that are many times more effective than what we think we may need, just because there are so many unknowns."

Hammond sighed, "But we had plenty of security and still the dinosaurs got out - at the worst time too: you, Malcolm and the lawyer were here to evaluate the safety of the park. The investors were concerned and demanded it. Now they'll want to shut us down. They wanted that before the events of the last day or so - they're afraid of lawsuits like the one - for $20 million - about a worker who was recently killed by Raptors. Having you all come to the park and check the it over was part of an effort to reassure them.

Malcolm's recommendation was as negative as possible before he got hurt and others got killed - now I expect he'll be even more stridently against the park. So I expect a hard fight with the investors."

"Well," Ellie said, "We don't know about lawsuits and investors, but we know you didn't have plenty of security. You thought you did, but there were major problems with it - for practical immediate purposes, you had electric fences and that's it."

"Yah," Grant added, "You'd mentioned concrete moats around the dinosaur enclosures, and if those had been complete, they'd have been an effective defense, but they were very much hit-and-miss: complete in some places but not others, for example."

Hammond nodded and asked them both "Save my park. I need experts to help me fix the park and make it more safe. I'm hoping you'll help."

Negotiations followed, but were fairly simple - Alan and Ellie were only too happy to get a chance to stay and study dinosaurs in detail. Actually being paid to do it was even better.

Hammond, for his part, was feeling generous. He wanted to motivate them, and keep them motivated, to be sure to make the park viable, meaning, first and foremost, safe.

So an amicable agreement was quickly reached all around.

The first thing Doctor Grant did was head off with Muldoon - there were still predators loose and the park's workers were not willing to come ashore until that was resolved.

Dilophosaurs and Procompsognathus, also known as Compys, had also gotten out of their enclosures and needed to be dealt with. Both had vicious teeth and were meat-eaters.

The Dilophosaurs, also known as Dilos, had been nicknamed spitters, since they spat poison up to 50 feet, usually aiming for the eyes. That made them quite dangerous even though each was only 4' tall or so.

There were 7 of them, and they were known to hang out at the river.

They were the bigger threat, so they would be dealt with first.

Grant and Muldoon each took a tranquilizer rifle, a Glock 23 gen 4 .40 pistol, and a machete.

More importantly, they took clear full-face shields - one for each, plus spares - such as folks wear in certain industrial jobs. Underneath those, they wore goggles. The idea was that if, for any reason, they had to remove the full-face shield, the goggles would still keep them from being vulnerable. The spitters' poison caused blindness and paralysis. The paralysis could be cured, but nobody was sure about the blindness, so they tried to be as safe as possible.

While they drove, they reviewed all that was known about both types of dinosaurs.

The Compys had been nicknamed 'killer chickens', because they were roughly the size of chickens, their bite was poisonous, and they hunted in packs. Luckily, their poison was weak - simple antihistamines took care of it easily, and even lacking those, it wouldn't kill - just anesthetize and cause a rash.

Still, they took along medical packs that held antihistamines.

Another thing to be aware of with the Compys is that they were largely scavengers, used to eating carrion. They only attacked live prey if it seemed helpless or nearly dead.

So, despite the dramatic nickname, they didn't expect much trouble from Compys.

Before they left, they had discussed with the others whether to simply kill all the predators. Predators were, after all, the only dinosaurs that had been trouble during what was being called the Nedry Disaster - when Dennis Nedry took the security systems offline and thereby released the dinosaurs.

What had decided the question was Doctor Grant's observation that, like it or not, dinosaurs had been brought back from extinction. Whether that was a good idea or not was beside the point. The technology existed and could not be 'un-invented'. Whether Jurassic Park had any Dilophosaurs etc or not, somebody else could learn how to make their own, now that it had been done once. Those 'somebody else's' may not be careful about releasing predatory dinosaurs.

So, in anticipation that, eventually, the information would get out and cause problems, what they needed was more information - information on how these predators lived and behaved. The main problem, as Malcolm had continuously pointed out, was that unknown animals are unpredictable.

The solution, then, is to make them known animals.

That is done by studying them, and that can be done best if you have some around to study.

So the T-Rex would be allowed to convalesce and recover, rather than being 'put down'. The recently hatched Velociraptors would be allowed to grow up. And the spitters and killer chickens would be rounded up instead of being eliminated.

All would then be studied - but, at least to start with, only in the most secure fashion they could imagine.

For the short term, that meant simple cages.

Various sizes of cages could be, and had been, ordered.

Alan and Ellie had taken measurements on the raptors they'd dissected - for muscle mass, muscle density and type, the leverage they'd get from their bones, and so on. Predictions, based on those measurements, of the Raptor's maximum strength matched fairly closely with the records Muldoon had kept of the strength that raptors had actually been observed to use.

All of that said that raptors were about as strong as apes - specifically, orangutans.

From zoo supply sites, there were cages available which were rated for orangutans, but, just in case, they'd had Hammond order cages rated for full-on gorillas. Orangutans weighed a little less, on average, than Raptors, but gorillas weighed more than twice as much as raptors, and, effectively all that extra mass was muscle. The dinosaurs were not yet fully understood by any means, but that could be compensated for by using safety measures rated much much stronger that the maximum strength you figured you'd need.

Similarly, they'd calculated the strength for Compys, Dilos, and Tyrannosaurus Rex. They didn't have samples to dissect, but they did have long experience with their bones and predictions made from just those. And from video recordings, they could get a pretty good estimate of their muscle mass. So now they made the assumption that their muscles were all just as good as those of raptors. This almost certainly rated the muscles too highly, except for T-Rex, but they wanted to be extra careful.

With the results of those calculations, they figured that cages rated for timber-wolves and minks would do for Dilos and Compys, respectively. They were comparable sizes, had comparable musculature, and the dinos were, at least as far as had been observed so far, far less ferocious than wolves and minks. But just in case, they ordered one category stronger again.

And for Dilos they added an outer cage of 1 inch-thick Lexan - a clear, bulletproof, polycarbonate - to prevent then spitting at anybody.

For T-Rexes, nobody carried cages such as they figured they would need.

So they ordered one specially made, according to the design used for kodiak bears, but scaled up and using much thicker diameter steel for the bars.

Actually, they ordered two such cages - to have a spare in case of need.

They considered a wide range of things as they discussed what bar diameter to use for the cages.

In the Worlds Strongest Man competition they used to have an event for bending steel bars.

A few of the contestants could bend half inch diameter bars, some could manage 5/8" when they got good leverage to get the bend started, but as the bar sizes increased, the contestants often just hurt themselves.

Frequent damage to the contestants was why they dropped that event from the competition.

And while humans have concepts like glory and winning that will drive them onward even when the activity in question if causing damage to them, animals do not. They are sensible enough to stop an activity well before it causes them any real damage.

A 2 inch diameter steel bar is not twice as strong as a 1 inch steel bar. Nor is it 4 times stronger, as would be suggested by simple math concerning its cross-sectional area. No, it's much stronger than that.

On top of that, cages get significant extra strength from all the cross-bracing, and even more strength can be added by certain kinds of tempering.

Re-bar, used for reinforcing concrete construction isn't commonly sold in sizes exceeding 2.337 inches diameter - not even for major construction like bridges. Bigger sizes just are not needed, except in very rare cases.

Similarly, streetlight posts are fastened by 2" diameter bolts to their underground supports. Bigger bolts are not needed to hold it in place, even despite high winds and car crashes. The hollow tube that is a streetlight post will bend and fail before the bolts would ever fail.

So it was not surprising that they calculated that, for containing the T-Rex safely, a cage made of 2.5 inch diameter steel bars would be adequate.

But they were not interested in merely being adequate, so of course they looked into getting it made from 3 inch diameter steel bars.

Then Hammond, remembering the fear from the dinosaur attacks, had changed the order to 4 inch diameter steel bars - just to be sure there was absolutely no way the T-Rex could break out.

Special construction like that cost plenty extra, but they wanted to be cautious.

The T-Rex cage would be too heavy to transport, so they had the parts shipped to the island for assembly there.

The cages for the 4 types of predators - Tyrannosaurus Rex, Dilophosaurs, Velociraptors and Procompsognathus - would be placed in a row, with electric fencing around them and a stout steel fence around that. The outer fence was mainly to keep tourists away from the electric fence, but it would be strong enough to hold in the dinosaurs at need, being made of thick concrete uprights with steel bars in-between them.

More meetings to discuss security were scheduled for when Grant and Muldoon got back from capturing the remaining predators.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

As Grant and Muldoon approached the Dilophosaurs' favorite place to hang out by the river, Muldoon took out a tablet computer connected to the Island's extensive security system. There were motion detectors covering 92% of the island, and cameras covering the whole island.

The only place not covered well was the river - the moving water tended to confuse the motion detectors.

Muldoon commented that they should mention that in their security meeting and get infrared heat detectors installed - enough for complete coverage - to make the system more reliable.

In the meantime, the existing system was adequate - it showed them where the Dilos had last been seen by motion detectors, and it focused video cameras on the parts of the river where they were likely to be.

In short order, all 7 Dilophosaurs were spotted by the cameras.

That made hunting them easy.

They just drove the jeep up near the river, acquired their targets through the scopes on their tranquilizer rifles, and fired.

One by one, Dilos simply fell over.

After 4 got tranquilized, the remaining 3 fled. They didn't know what was happening, but they knew they didn't like it.

They got lost among the trees, so Grant and Muldoon had to go in after them.

Despite Muldoon's vast experience at hunting, the dinosaurs saw them first.

Big viscous globs of poisonous spit hit their full-face shields. Grant's got hit twice and Muldoon's got hit once.

Muldoon, by twisting a little, could still see through the face-shield well enough to shoot. He located a Dilo immediately and shot it with a tranquilizer dart, then quickly spotted and tranq'ed a second Dilo.

Grant - having been hit twice - could see nothing out of the front of his face shield. He reached up to remove his goo-smeared face-shield so he could replace it with a spare. But as he did so the third Dilo leapt out at him from behind a tree.

It tried to bite his throat and tear it open while he was blinded.

But Alan still had enough peripheral vision to see it coming. There was no time for him to do more than to use his tranquilizer rifle as a pugil-stick to block his attacker as they'd been taught in National Guard.

He blocked vigorously, as he'd been taught. He was charged with far more adrenaline than he'd ever had in training.

In training he's been up against fully grown men, weighing somewhere around 200 pounds, not Dilophosaurs weighing only 80 pounds or so.

His rifle butt connected solidly with the dinosaur's head, delivering a sharp blow and briefly stunning it.

While it was stunned, Grant had a moment to get his bearings.

So when Dr. Grant reversed his stroke and hit the Dilo with the other end of his gun, he followed up by jamming the gun's muzzle into the dino's neck and pulling the trigger.

The tranquilizer gun was designed to send the dart flying at least a hundred feet & then penetrate thick hide at the end of its flight.

The neck of a Dilophosaur was understrength anyway, as far as necks went, and the dart - fired pointblank into it - became a lethal projectile, going in one side and out the other & leaving a trail a shredded flesh and torn arteries behind.

The Dilo fell down and thrashed around as it bled out, then went limp, and stayed still.

Muldoon had been hurrying over with his machete raised to strike the Dilo, but when he saw that such help was no longer needed, he instead used his machete to salute Dr Grant, indicating wry respect and approval.

They each carried a tranquilized Dilo back to the jeep and applied restraints, then went back for the dead one.

Muldoon picked it up to carry it to the jeep, but Grant held back saying, "I want to scout around a bit before heading back. I know the computer said that only 5 types of dinosaurs were engineered with frog DNA - and were therefore possibly capable of breeding: Maiasaurs, Othnielia, Hypsilodontids, Procompsognathus, and Velociraptors. But I want to be as sure as I can that no others can, so I'll look around for eggs and nesting sites.

Muldoon grunted affirmation and started back to the jeep with his burden. They planned to dissect it later and he'd be getting a steak from that dissection, so he didn't mind.

Grant turned and started walking along the river bank, looking for good nesting sites. He was looking so hard for those that he missed a mossy tree root, slipped on it, and went down hard.

He lay there stunned for a minute or two, then heard rustling in the bushes.

He looked and spotted a pack of Compys coming his way.

Apparently he looked like carrion, laying there immobile and covered in blood from the Dilophosaur he'd shot.

He sat up, but the Compys barely paused in their approach.

They hadn't learned to fear humans yet.

Perhaps this would teach them.

When he'd fallen, Alan had lost his tranquilizer rifle, and his small pack holding things such as extra clips of ammo.

But he still had his machete and, more importantly, his pistol and the magazine inside it.

The standard magazine for a Glock 23 is 13 rounds, but this one extended slightly out the butt of the gun and held 15 rounds.

He used them all.

Normally, a trained shot - such as he was - could easily hit something that size at that range with every shot.

But in stressful situations, it is much harder to aim and hit things. He did exceptionally well for such situations and killed 9 of the approaching Compys, starting at the back of the group and working forward.

The Compys in the front only heard loud noises and didn't see their packmates dying behind them, so they kept coming.

Grant, his pistol empty now, drew his machete and chopped the lead Compy as it leapt.

The 2 Compys behind it had no trouble seeing the result.

As the body of the lead Compy fell in 2 halves from the long blade, Doctor Grant stood and yelled,

"What makes the green grass grow?"

The 2 Compys fled.

They had learned to fear humans.

They didn't get far. Muldoon, hurrying towards the sound of gunfire, spotted them and shot both with his tranquilizer rifle.

Any others caught would be kept in the same cage with them and hopefully learn from them not to attack humans.

As they drove back to the Jurassic Park visitor's center Muldoon asked,

"What was that about grass?"

"Oh, sorry - I was reverting to my military training just then. They had us shout that during bayonet training."

"But that doesn't make any sense." Muldoon replied.

"You haven't heard all of it. You don't want to: it's fairly vicious. The military spends a lot of time taking normal people and getting them to the point where they are willing to kill - an army is no good if they won't, and normal people won't, so a lot of training focuses on changing that."

"That sounds really risky, to say the least." Muldoon mused.

"No, that's necessary. An army's job is to kill people and break things - just like the Fire Department's job is to put out fires - or be ready to do so. Other things may occasionally be asked of them, but that's their job. If the troops won't do their job, they are useless. And if you don't have an effective army, then it's only a mater of time until some neighboring country or group of people try to kill or enslave you, whether because they want what you have, don't like you for some reason, don't like what your ancestors did, or just want to eliminate the potential threat which you represent.

So we train folks to be willing to kill - under the right circumstances.

We have centuries of experience knowing where to stop so we don't create maniacs.

Which, come to think of it, is another complex unpredictable area where we accept some risk and proceed despite the risk. A few go bad, but very few."

They continued discussing it all the way back.

As soon as they got back, they inspected the enclosure that the raptors formerly used. They examined its security potential generally, and searched for eggs. They did find some raptor eggs, but none were viable - apparently the Raptors could almost breed, but not quite.

After taking those for study and repairing the electric fencing around the tall concrete enclosure, they put the Dilophosaurs in it, sealed it up, and went to go do dissections of the dead dinosaurs.

The cage had tall concrete walls so they were not concerned about the Dilos spitting at anybody.

The Compy cage would be delivered the next day and until then they could live in a convenient metal shipping container.

Grant and Ellie spent all day dissecting and studying Compys and the one dead Dilophosaur.

Muldoon participated until he had a steak of each type, then left to eat.

Unexpectedly, he came back in about an hour, exclaiming, "Compy is delicious! It's like a nice tangy chicken - an unusual but very appealing flavor. Raptor and Dilo are fine & I wouldn't turn down a steak of either kind, but I'd hike a mile barefoot for some nice Compy meat. How much more can you spare?"

Grant laughed and indicated a pile of meat, then said, "There may be more coming. We still need to collect the rest of them - the computers say there are still 52 of them out there, in 4 packs."

"Don't I know it mate?" Muldoon smacked his lips, "We've been waiting for nightfall so they'd all settle down and be easier to collect, but now I wonder if we shouldn't go now - maybe some will resist and I'll get to eat them. Here, you've got to try this." He held out a bite-size sample of roast meat to each of the doctors.

They let him feed them, since their hands were covered in gore and they didn't want to touch anything until they'd cleaned them.

Their reactions were the same "Wow, that really is good."

"See?" Muldoon said. "In our next meeting we really need to consider farming these guys for use in the restaurant. They're one of the kinds than can breed and that could be a real advantage in this case."

They discussed the idea while the dissections continued.

Then after it was done and the doctors had cleaned up, Grant and Muldoon went out hunting again - to capture the remaining Compys.

This proved to be remarkably easy.

The security system easily pinpointed all 4 packs of Compys So Grant and Muldoon simply drove to the right area and hiked the last few hundred yards, so the sound of the jeep's engine would not disturb the animals.

Then, with the sleeping pack in sight, they lobbed a flash-bang grenade in among them and covered their own ears and eyes.

The grenades were designed to stun full sized humans, so they completely overwhelmed and knocked out the little animals.

A few were killed by the concussive blast, but that didn't disappoint Muldoon, who intended to eat them, and was willing to share.

Then the pair of humans simply went around and collected the Compys - both the dead and the stunned. They tied their legs together and taped their mouths shut in case they woke up soon, then went and got the next pack.

The process went smoothly with all 4 packs.

It may not have, if the animals had learned to fear humans, since each pack kept a lookout who'd seen the humans coming. But the lookouts had not issued any warnings & so the packs stayed asleep until the grenades went off.

In the morning, while the park maintenance workers were hard at work repairing damage from the Nedry Disaster as well as storm damage, John Hammond went to see Doctors Grant and Sattler again.

"We have a problem," Hammond started.

"That mathematician Malcolm - curse his tiny brain - just can't get the vision of what we want to do with the park or how it could work. Before this, he was always full of bad predictions, based, ironically, on the fact that we can't predict dinosaur behavior or capabilities. But now he has exceeded himself. He's sent in a long detailed diatribe to my investors. They wanted his report and he gave them an earful. Two earfulls, even. He went on at great length about his opinion that the park is a disaster waiting to happen - except he didn't identify it as merely his opinion. No, he doesn't have opinions - not according to him anyway. He pitched it all as if it was unavoidable fact. He painted a picture of regular - even continuous - dinosaur attacks resulting in constant casualties and lawsuits. And the helicopter pilot and medics who evacuated him backed him up with detailed descriptions of the T-Rex running loose and secondhand accounts of the attacks and casualties.

They left off the fact that you simply shot it and put it down, saying instead that being shot didn't kill it and that it was still alive and uncontained when last they saw it. I guess that's strictly true, but very misleading."

He took a breath and went on.

"The investors are demanding a meeting with me in a few minutes. They already told me why: they want to immediately abandon the island - walk away from all our investment here and have the Costa Rican airforce firebomb the whole island to try to kill all the dinosaurs! Can you imagine?"

He finished, "I have a couple of options, but before I confront them, I wanted to check with you and be absolutely clear as to whether this park can be made safe. What do you think?"

Ellie replied, "Yes it can be made safe. Only the predators have been a problem and they will all be in cages very soon."

Hammond pressed, "But Muldoon says some of these animals - the Raptors at least - are 'cage breakers'. Does that mean cages won't be enough?"

"The more security we can arrange, the better," Ellie replied, "But if we couldn't arrange anything more than just cages, those would be enough.

'Cage breaker' refers to an animal that is good at figuring out how to open its cage and escape. But however good at it they are, it's measured on an animal scale - Humans are far far smarter. Yet we build cages all the time that humans can't break out of or into - like jails and banks. To even make a serious attempt at those, you need special tools - lockpicks, files etc. Animals are not tool users. So we'll simply set up these cages as if they were jail cells to hold humans."

"But," Hammond persisted, "Malcolm - who is after all a mathematician - suggests that the raptors can just bite or gnaw through the cage bars, since they have a whopping 15,000 psi bite strength."

Grant laughed, then explained. "Now he's just being hysterical. If any dino does try to bite his way out, we'll be calling that animal 'gummo' for the rest of his life. Teeth are basically made of bone, and bone is significantly weaker than iron or steel.

Sure Raptors have a super-strong bite, but that doesn't make bone stronger than steel - when you press teeth into steel with anything like that kind of force, the bone will shatter leaving them toothless. Let them try."

Ellie added, "Look, how often do polar bears, gorillas, lions, or even orcas break free and kill someone?

I can't recall a case.

Sure there may be some, but the point is that it's rare - rare enough that people go to the zoo anyway despite the risk.

And orcas are very comparable in size, weight, & max speed, to a T-Rex. What's more, orcas are probably stronger - T-Rex has nothing comparable to an orcas tail slap. Orcas have tons of muscle focused on moving that tail powerfully. They can move the tail fast enough and strong enough to accelerate rapidly despite massive water resistance. They can slap the water with their tail hard enough to stun fish.

So an orca, charging the glass of his aquarium or slapping it with his tail can exert a vast amount of energy - not to mention that the glass, actually acrylic, is already strained by holding back that much water - and yet they don't break out.

Flesh has limits, but there isn't any limit to how much concrete and steel you can use.

So yes, we can build things strong enough to contain such animals as these."

Alan nodded and said, "Think about it this way - the Nedry Disaster was a worst-case scenario. It happened when we knew less about Dinosaurs than we ever will again. All our systems failed due to internal sabotage. And we didn't have the right kind of systems anyway: It was all active stuff like electric fences and no passive stuff like walls and moats - not complete enough walls or moats to matter, at least. Further, we had way too many predators and had gone too far in seeking the most impressive way to keep them and display them - they were all running free in their own paddocks, except the Raptors.

And despite all that, we lost 3 killed and one injured. That's far fewer people than would have been lost in one plane crash - a smallish plane crash at that. You could easily lose that many in a car wreck. Yet from that event, we can learn and improve, making it less likely that anything like it can ever happen again. Risk can't ever be eliminated - people still die occasionally in zoos - but risk can be reduced to the point that folks don't worry about it.

Malcolm likes to imply that uncertainty about something's safety is the same as certainty that everything will go wrong. It isn't"

"Yes," Hammond agreed, "I can see that. I don't think I can convince the investors after the job he did on them. But that's actually ok - I can work with that. The investors have often been a hindrance anyway. They're mainly afraid of lawsuits eating up all the profits - more than all of them, actually. The lawsuit that was already filed was for $20 million and who knows what the next few, which we can expect from the Nedry Disaster - will be for. The investors would rather throw away all the money they've already spent rather than open themselves to that kind of risk.

We'll see what I can't manage. I know the ins and outs of business pretty well.

Wish me luck, I'm off to take their call."

The doctors wished him luck and off he went in an oddly cheerful mood.

Later, at dinner, Hammond was a curious mix of optimistic anxiety.

When they asked him how the call went, he said.

"Very well, or poorly, depending on how you look at it: we no longer have any investors. They couldn't be convinced that lawsuits from our 'fundamentally unsafe' park wouldn't ruin them. They pushed strongly for evacuating the island and then firebombing the whole place. But I know some business tricks. I pointed out to them that I'd bought this island & then just leased it to them, which meant that if they abandoned it, I could legally salvage it, become the outright owner for free, and continue on without them. And, depending on how a judge interpreted the law, they'd still be partly liable for anything that went wrong, since they helped create it all. Then I pointed out that it would be quite expensive to pay the Costa Rican airforce to firebomb the island - 22 square miles of island would take a truly staggering number of bombs to make sure you got all the dinosaurs. I emphasized that the investors were only considering firebombing as a way to be sure to be safe from lawsuits. Once I let them stew over that for a while, I offered them a way out. We now have signed contracts with the former investors, officially absolving them of all responsibility for and involvement in the park, for which I got them to pay me a tidy sum - not as much as the firebombing would have cost, but a reasonable portion of it. They considered that it saved them money compared to their firebombing-and-abandonment plan, but they got the same assurance either way."

He paused for breath, then continued, "What this means is that we're not going to be shut down, but that we have limited funds - enough to continue as we are for about 6 months. We'll need to open soon to get an income stream to offset our expenses. Can we do it?"

"What about lawsuits?" Ellie asked.

"Oh, I'm not as worried about those as they were - not every country has laws allowing people to 'get rich via lawsuit'. John Hammond Incorporated - which now owns the park outright - is incorporated in one of those countries which limits lawsuits. So lawsuits against the park will be in a jurisdiction which caps all lawsuits at reasonable levels - in this kind of case, roughly what an average life insurance policy would pay. It says something about human nature that, when they're paying for it themselves - by buying a life-insurance policy - they figure a certain amount of cash is needed to replace the lost income from a deceased breadwinner. But when someone else is paying for it, suddenly they figure they need something like 100 times as much money. Sure there is a lot more to the situation in either case, but it still says a lot.

Anyway, we'll still want to avoid generating any more lawsuits, but they ultimately can't ruin us, or cost us more than the park is worth."

"Well, as for opening soon," Doctor Grant said, "It won't be at the level of opulence you originally aimed for, but it can be done. The animals already exist. The visitor's center here is only a couple weeks from being completed. And, except for some additional basic security, other things can be brought online as we go. For security, we'll need some more earth-moving and concrete-work equipment so we can finish the system of moats and walls. And we need something to replace the silly electric Land Rovers in which people actually do the tours. Those Land Rovers became inert and useless lumps when power was lost, and they provided no protection at all from dinosaurs. We need something that does, just in case of disaster."

"What would?" asked Hammond.

"I've been thinking about that," Doctor Grant replied, "and I have some ideas. I've been checking this afternoon to make sure they'd work and it looks good so far. Given your budget, we'll want to go with refurbished used vehicles rather than new ones, but, according to this one Czechoslovakian website, we can have that soon enough - it only takes them 2 months."

"What only takes them 2 months?" Hammond asked.

"Taking an old Armored Personnel Carrier from a military 'boneyard', refurbishing it, and shipping it to you. The vehicles that have been sitting there rusting for a while only cost from 1 to 5 thousand. Those that are still functional but need lots of refurbishing cost a couple thousand more. Ones that have been fully refurbished - to civilian sedan levels of 'trim' - are selling on ebay for about $50,000. That's about the level we'd want - military vehicles are, shall we say, 'Spartan', yet you want your park attendees to feel pampered, or at least well cared for. APC's have thick enough armor to stop dino attacks cold. Even if, in theory, a given dino could get past the inch or so of armor, he'll probably never find that out, since no animal that I know of would persist once he hurts his teeth trying. And he won't have time & leisure to try anyway if the APC's armaments are working, as they should be."

They got busy discussing it, hashing out the details, finding what would work, and contacting countries and companies.

Of the type that Grant wanted - LVTP-5's - 1124 had been produced. Chile had many old vehicles in storage - parked in a weed-filled lot, aka a 'boneyard', and mostly forgotten. They'd been kept in case of need, then after a while longer, they'd been marked as being available for scrap. But scrapping such vehicles was not easy - they were designed to be resistant to damage, so there was a long backlog of such scrap jobs and consequently they had not yet been scrapped.

The Philippines also had several old vehicles in a boneyard.

Between the 2 countries, they could probably get a good price. Availability drives down price.

FMC Corporation said they could supply refurbished engines and transmissions to better specifications than the original. They had them on-hand after similar vehicles - LVTP-7's - had been upgraded not too long ago. The LVTP-7's had actually had several such upgrades over the years, but their newest 'castoffs' were still available.

Costa Rica gave them permission to keep the .30 caliber machineguns working rather than 'de-militarising' them.

The Czech company ExArmyVehicles had a dot com website with contact information, and they said they'd be happy to do the refurbishment. Two similar dot com's - mv-fs and tdm-military - offered to help with parts and such.

Better yet, they were even willing to make a few modifications as they went.

The standard Landing Vehicle Tracked Personnel, version 5, or LVTP-5, looked a bit like a refrigerator lying on it's back and crawling along. They were squat, wide, and long vehicles.

Alan wanted them - instead of any of a variety of other APC's - because they seated an amazing 35 fully equipped soldiers each - 3 or 4 times what most APC's seated. Also because each was so heavy - at 41 tons loaded weight - that any dinosaur would have trouble affecting it at all.

The Land Rovers had been easy for the T-Rex to push around and maul, but the T-Rex probably couldn't even budge an LVTP-5, also known as Amphibious Tractors or Amtracks.

So the vehicles were great as far as passive defenses went. Even if everything else in the park failed and all the predators got out to attack tourists, those tourists would be safe in their tour vehicles - the Amtracks.

But to become tour vehicles, they needed some changes. Folks don't pay to go see dinosaurs in person only to be locked into an armored box with no viewports. So viewports would have to be added.

In consultation with the companies in question, they decided on viewports as follows:

By each seat, a 4 inch high, 16 inch long, slit would be cut into the armor at two heights - one suited for viewing while standing, and one for seated viewing or for kids' use. They'd be offset from each other, so both could be used at once.

Each viewing slit would have plenty or armor remaining to its sides, top, and bottom, to guarantee structural strength, but just in case they added some armor wherever they thought it could use some, since the new engines, transmissions, and suspensions could handle more weight than the originals could.

The viewing slits would be covered and sealed by thick acrylic windows, of the same type and thickness used by SeaWorld and similar places for the big water tanks which hold whale-sharks and orcas.

This left a bulge in the side of the Amtracks, as the acrylic was thicker than the metal and so stuck out a few inches. So they added some thick sheetmetal to smooth out the transition from the flat side of the vehicle to the protruding viewport, creating a bulge in the side. In part of the space thus created, they made small compartments into which they pumped in air to create a high overpressure - into those they put in the same powder used in Pepper-spray. They designed it so that any attack on the Amtrack would rupture the the outside of the overpressurized compartments, releasing the pepper-spray outward - right into the attacking dinosaur's face.

Pepperspray can make an attacking grizzly bear desist and flee, and they put, into each compartment, a lot more than you'd use on any mere grizzly.

The bulges created around the viewports also had room for 'enhanced vision' systems, which were installed by each seat. These were special motorized binoculars which could be aimed by a joystick at each seat inside the vehicle. They could be looked through directly - with the image reflected through part of the viewport - or they could be set to project their 'take' onto a small video screen. Either way, they could point at what you wanted to see, and show it to you. Then, with a simple button-press, they could take pictures - either still-frame or video.

Each screen would also connect to a feed from the Park's security system to show vectors, distances, and types, of each dinosaur the passengers could potentially see.

Hammond planned to charge for each picture thus taken.

The last change they ordered, for now, to the Amtracks was that each be equipped with the optional bulldozer blade. Some variants came with that and were called 'engineering vehicles', but they wanted each vehicle to have it, since that way they could clear any obstacle before them at need, whether it was a fallen tree, landslide, or dinosaur - living or dead.

Being stuck behind obstacles would diminish a tourists' enjoyment, if it was allowed to happen.

The Land Rover fleet had been 36 vehicles, with each able to seat 4, or maybe 5 if they were friendly.

An Amtrack could seat 35 people comfortably - they had room for a backpack and weapon for each passenger, so for people not so equipped, they'd feel fairly roomy - as well as up to 3 crew. So to get the same overall capacity for handling tourists, they only needed about 4 LVTP-5's

But, on thinking about it, they realized they could have vehicles touring continuously and get far more 'throughput', or in other words a much larger number of tourists enjoying the park at any one time.

Even with only 11 miles of road on the touring route around the dinosaur paddocks, and with spacing vehicles no closer than half a mile to each-other, that still meant they could use 22 vehicles at once. They added in a couple more so a full touring schedule can be maintained even when some vehicles were down for maintenance, and therefore bought an even 2 dozen.

Later, they'd want more as they expanded the road system, but for now it'd be a good start.

Chile gave them the best price on scrap LVTP-5's, so they bought them from there. But they got options from both countries for more vehicles at a later date.

ExArmyVehicles sent out people and heavy equipment to do the refurbishing on site, since that would save both time and money.

It was cheaper to send their refurbishing equipment to the island and back, than it was to send the vehicles themselves to Czechoslovakia and back.

It would also enable them to start testing as the first few came online.

Doctor Grant was insistent that, no matter what theory and calculations said, the vehicles actually be tested for safety versus a real dinosaur attack.

So they bought a rig to drive a vehicle by remote-control, so no humans would be at risk during such tests.

They also bought force meters and shock gauges, so they could measure exactly what forces dinosaurs were bringing to bear.

The first Amtrack to have its refurbishing and alterations completed was then set up for remote control and taking force measurements.

Then it was tested.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The timing worked pretty well, in a way.

The Tyrannosaur had been immobilized - using heavy-duty cargo tie-downs - while it's knee healed.

It had obviously hated the experience. But, according to the veterinarian, it's leg was now ready to be be used again.

So they tranquilized it, trucked it to an appropriate testing spot in its paddock, and set up the test.

They drove the Amtrack to a spot near the T-Rex, strapped big chunks of raw meat to the vehicle - with some outside and more visible inside - and waited for the T-Rex to awake.

When it awoke, it was ferocious. The beast was angry at having been restrained for so long, and it hadn't eaten recently so it was hungry.

The Amtrack drove around a bit - as if trying to escape - to encourage the T-Rex to attack vigorously.

That worked - the Tyrannosaur charged and slammed into the vehicle.

That was the only time it ever did that, no matter what they tried. The Tyrannosaur got bruised up by the impact and learned that it was just as bad an idea to body-slam an Amtrack as it was to charge into a stone cliff.

After learning that, it was no more willing to slam into the Amtrack than a human is willing to tackle a lamppost.

More cautiously, the T-Rex ate the meat off the outside of the vehicle, then tried to bite and claw his way inside to get to the rest of the meat.

He bit the corner between the roof and the side.

He clawed at the armor in various spots.

He clawed at the Acrylic view ports quite a bit.

And he tried to fit his claw in through the one vision-slit that had been left open - its Acrylic not installed yet. They'd left that slit open for just this kind of test, and they learned what they'd wanted to learn - the T-Rex's thin little arm was still too big to get in through the open vision slit.

So even if the acrylic failed somehow, anybody inside the Amtrack would still be safe.

After a while, the T-Rex gave up and wandered off.

The damage to the Amtrack was slight. There were some bright shiny scratches in the armor from both tooth and claw, but none was more than superficial. They didn't go deep - not enough to warrant any concern - because the T-Rex hadn't wanted to break off it's own teeth or claws.

Try to get a human to bite down hard on a stone and you'll see the same result - they may bite lightly to test it, but after a point they can tell than any further effort will just hurt themselves.

Then they will desist.

The worst damage to the Amtrack was from the initial body-slam. It had a modest dent from that - not even as deep as if a human had tried to open a can of beans by hand, without any tools. A barehanded human attacking a can of beans may dent the weakest part, but will almost certainly do nothing to the stronger part - the join between the sides and the lid, where the can is effectively thicker. The whole Amtrack was as strong as that, comparatively.

A Czech worker had come out to see how well the Amtrack - which he'd personally worked on - held up, and commented, "I'm surprised there isn't more damage."

Doctor Grant replied. "Have you ever seen a human tear a frying pan in half using only his bare hands? Of course you haven't. Neither have I. The muscle-to-metal ratio is similar in both cases, and the frying pan trick would be easier, since the Amtrack gets additional strength from its box-like shape."

The worker mused. "I lost the key to my metal toolbox once. I was in a hurry, so I tried to kick it open. All I did was hurt my foot. I guess this is about like that."

It was good that they'd had the force meters etc installed in the Amtrack, since further attempts to get the T-Rex to attack the vehicle were futile. With the measurements they'd taken, they could at least simulate T-Rex attacks for future safety tests.

They shot the T-Rex with a tranquilizer dart and knocked it out, so it could be loaded back into its cage for safety. The paddock wasn't adequately secure yet.

Then, considering that to be a successful test, they moved on and tested with a Brachiosaur.

As the biggest creature on the island, they had concerns that it might be able to damage the vehicles, such as by swatting it with its tail.

But it proved to be difficult to get a Brachiosaur to do anything to the Amtrack - just as difficult as getting a human to punch a sidewalk, and for the same reason - they don't want to hurt themselves for no purpose.

So they had real trouble finding out what kind of force it could deliver, since it chose not to do so.

They did get one successful test, by placing the Amtrack nearby & then having it sit idle and quiet until the Brachiosaur forgot about it. Then, when chance meanderings had placed the Brachiosaur in the right spot, they played, over loudspeakers, the roar of an attacking T-Rex. The Brachiosaur quickly turned away from the sound and ran - right into the Amtrack.

The vehicle and the dinosaur both rocked back a bit, and the Amtrack got a little dented again, but that was about it.

The dinosaur left and went about its business. The veterinarian, observing it on the security system, declared that it seemed a bit bruised but otherwise ok.

The force meters had good measurements, and, since they couldn't think of another way to get the Brachiosaur to attack, they moved on to the next test.

They wanted to see what a charging Triceratops could do.

But they didn't want to kill the poor beast via a concussion or a broken neck, which seemed possible.

Similarly it was too easy to imagine its horns shattering when they met steel with the force of a charge, and they didn't want the beast damaged that way either.

They'd been doing what research they could and had learned that an orca named Kandu V had died when trying to ram another orca in a social dominance contest. Kandu V had missed, and had instead hit a wall and got hurt. The fractured jaw was bad enough but the ruptured artery had killed her.

They didn't want anything like that happening to their dinosaurs.

So they found something else to test with.

None of the dinosaurs in the park were "version 1". Rather, each had been through multiple versions as errors in the genetic code showed up and killed them off. The next version would fix the known errors and try again - growing new animals from the new code. All of the current versions were 'stable', meaning that none had fatal genetic conditions. Efforts were ongoing to fix any non-fatal genetic conditions, except of course for the Lysine dependency that had been introduced for security reasons.

The Maiasaurs, for instance, were version 2.9, and a version 3.0 was planned.

The Procompsognathus, or Compys, were version 3.7 but any developments there were on hold while they investigated what to do about predatory dinosaurs. Doctor Wu was looking into options.

Triceratops were at version 3.1.

But the fact that there had been previous versions gave them an opportunity: when those earlier animals had died, samples had been saved for study. Those samples included a couple full skulls, plus horns, from Triceratops.

So they approximated a Triceratops by mounting the skull and horns from a deceased sample onto an electric Land-Rover, along with their remote-control rig and a bunch of sandbags to get it's weight up to where it needed to be for a good test.

Then they got the Land-Rover up to 'Testing Speed' - twice the speed they'd even seen a Triceratops charge - and rammed it into a weakpoint on the Amtrack.

The Land-Rovers had been judged expendable, which was why they'd been selected for this test.

That was good, because the Land-Rover was totaled.

The skull and horns were shattered.

And the Amtrack, as studied later in slow motion videos taken of the event, experienced a number of interesting effects.

It's well known that when a train hits a car, the car gets destroyed and the train takes little if any damage, but even when a car hits the side of a train, it's still the car that suffers real damage.

Simply put, the thicket metal wins every time, and the Amtrack was thickest here.

Just as water flows downhill by the path of least resistance, so does force expend itself where it is easiest to do so.

So, while the crash generated significant amounts of energy, most of that went into shredding the Land-Rover.

The Amtrack's tracks would need repair since the metal tracks, which normally ride along 'road wheels', were knocked off those road wheels. The vehicle got shoved sideways a little and its wheels dug into the road, damaging them somewhat.

Further, the Amtrack briefly tilted about six inches - well short of the more than 10' needed to reach its tipping point, so it was in no real danger of being knocked onto its side.

The vehicle's frame got a little twisted from the torque.

And, most visibly, it had an impressive dent in its side, - it was half the height of the vehicle, just as wide, almost half a foot deep and included 3 smaller dents where the horns had hit.

That was more than they'd expected, given that their research had turned up comparables where a 15 ton propane truck had a rollover crash which only dented its propane tank about 3 inches deep, and another case where an airplane, in the midst of landing, had its landing wheel hit a propane tank and dent it about the same.

Propane tanks got extra strength from their shape, but they were made of thinner metal than the Amtrack.

Most of them, that is.

Propane tanks that are entire train cars are about an inch thick - roughly the same thickness as the Amtrack.

But even train derailments involving such propane cars did not tend to dent those tanks much - as long as the propane did not explode.

Explosions were a different question though.

Damage from dinosaurs was what they were looking into here.

And they judged that the Amtrack had passed the test.

It was decided not to test with real Triceratops - the animal seemed unlikely to survive any crash which would have a chance of hurting an Amtrack.

So they declared the testing complete and moved on, confident that their tour vehicles - the Amtracks, were safe.

Concerned that tourists would have heard of the attacks during the Nedry Disaster, Hammond arranged a display.

He put the 2 Land Rovers the T-Rex had wrecked next to the Amtrack they'd used for their testing, so people could see the difference.

They say "seeing is believing", and he hoped the obvious differences would calm any fears, especially since the Amtrack was still drivable - after they put its tracks back on.

But being on display, allowing Tourists to inspect it and take short rides in it, meant it was no longer in the regular rotation for touring the park.

So Hammond ordered one more Amtrack, to be included with the last shipment of 6. They'd been shipping 6 at a time, since the freighter they'd been shipping them in couldn't carry much more.

When the last 7 vehicles arrived, there was a mixup. They were not sure if it was caused by the change, by sloppy 'boneyard' management, or by some other confusion.

But however it happened, one of the vehicles was a standard LVTP-5 Amtrack, with a .30 caliber machinegun, while the other 6 were the "fire support" model of LVTP-5, with turreted 105 millimeter howitzers.

Grant, on seeing them, grinned, yelled, "ooo-rah!", and said, "now we're talking! That's some real firepower there."

Given his enthusiasm, Hammond didn't try to swap the vehicles for the standard kind.

Alan Grant explained. "With machineguns, each vehicle can defend itself. But vehicles armed with these lovely howitzers can defend any point on the island, from any other point on the island. That could come in very useful."

"Aren't they to dangerous to keep? Shouldn't such things be restricted to soldiers?" Ellie asked.

"A soldier is really just someone you've hired and trained." Grant responded. "Sure, you've tried to make sure not to get any lunatics. And their contract is more complicated than regular job hiring. But the essence of it is that they are vetted, loyal, and trained. There's nothing magical about that. Nothing prevents us from hiring carefully selected individuals and training them to use these, call these people what you will."

Doctor Grant took the lead in hiring drivers and gunners, since he had military experience and said he knew what to look for.

And he got people to work, looking into buying or making special ammunition for their weapons.

He also hired his former dig team - the budding archaeologists needed work, and were excited to be around dinosaurs. Plus they had a wide range of skills among them. And Jurassic Park needed more humans, so they were not so dependent on automation.

When Grant's dig team arrived, and Hammond saw their excitement, he got on the phone.

Soon, several other dinosaur researchers were paying Hammond for the opportunity to work at the Park and study Dinosaurs.

Doctors Grant and Sattler protested charging them, and Hammond reduced the fee down to about what they'd be paying to run and staff excavations anyway, though he added a requirement to share their research with him.

On thinking about it, Alan and Ellie approved - the unpredictability of the dinosaurs was a problem and the more scientists they had studying it, the faster it would become known and predictable.

Meanwhile, work was proceeding at a rapid pace in a number of areas.

First they got a lot of earth-moving machinery busy in completing the system of moats and walls around each dinosaur paddock.

The system had previously been haphazard and incomplete: at the place where the T-Rex had attacked the Land-Rovers, there had been no moat and the T-Rex had simply stepped over the wall. But very close to that same point, where Grant and the kids went over the wall, they'd had to climb down quite a distance to get to ground level.

That was because, in that case, a mound of dirt - over 120 feet tall - from nearby moat excavation had formed a hill next to the completed wall.

Many such errors existed and needed to be corrected. The walls were mostly done right, since the electric fencing had had to be built on top of them. But in several places, mounds of dirt from other excavations had been casually shoved up to them.

In some places the walls would need to be buttressed.

The moats were pretty incomplete.

It didn't matter how strong or vicious a dinosaur was - it's weight limited how far it could safely fall. And it could only jump so far.

So a concrete-lined moat deeper than the dinosaur could risk falling, and much wider than it could ever jump, was an excellent barrier, as long as you didn't allow it to fill with water.

Dinosaurs could swim, so allowing the moat to become a river would negate its value.

So the rest of the moat system got dug, and lined with concrete. Then pumps were installed to keep them dry.

Then, in a nod to the unpredictability of dinosaurs, they routed some of those pumps to pump water to the ground near the moats. They adjusted it until the had it right. What they wanted, and got, was to use the dinosaur's great weight against them. Humans and other animals have real trouble moving through thick mud. And the heavier the animal gets, the more prone it is to sinking in the mud, since mud just will not support weight.

So they made sure there was thick deep mud around each paddock, up against the moat, which itself was up against the wall, which was still topped with electric fencing.

In between the electric fence and the touring road which sightseeing vehicles would use, there was a new chainlink fence. It was intended to stop any tourists from getting to the electric fence and hurting themselves on it.

Another purpose of the muddy zone was to keep the dinosaurs well away from the wall and therefore more visible from the sightseeing road above. The park was intended for tourism after all.

When construction was done, each dinosaur paddock was completely lined with a thin line of swampy mud, which would prevent any dinosaur from getting an effective running start on a jump to try to get over the moat.

It was not that they expected any of their 15 dinosaur species to be able to do amazing and legendary levels of jumping - except the Raptors, which didn't get to live in a paddock & had to stay in a cage instead - but that they were trying to prepare for the unpredictable.

Of course, even if a dinosaur had a hitherto-unknown mythically-effective ability to jump, it wouldn't get very far. If it could clear the moat despite the mud, it still had a tall wall to deal with, and these were of a height either 3 times higher than the dinosaur had been observed or calculated to jump, or twice the dinosaur's own height, whichever was more.

And, between the moat and the base of the wall, there was no room for a dinosaur to stand. That, effectively made the wall higher, by adding the depth of the moat to it.

And if a dinosaur could somehow climb a tall vertical concrete wall, it still had the electric fence and security system to deal with.

The security system wouldn't do anything directly to stop the dinosaur - it only monitored the locations and activity of all dinosaurs all the time. But that enabled an almost-instant human response to any need.

If, somehow, through some almost-magic unsuspected abilities, a dinosaur was succeeding in the act of getting out of its enclosure, it would be met by humans in armored vehicles armed with machineguns, or similar measures.

A potential weakpoint to each paddock was the necessary access roads. The veterinarian and maintenance crews had to get to in to the paddocks from time to time, and, given the scale of things, they needed to do it in vehicles.

The system of sightseeing roads was built next to the top of each paddock-enclosing wall, and the maintenance access roads used some of the same 'road trunks'. Consequently, they were also well above the height of each paddock floor.

So ramps had been built down from the top of the enclosing walls, for the access roads to get in to and out of each paddock. There were two ramps per paddock for redundancy in case of problems.

For the security upgrades they were doing, they altered the ramps and the points at which the access roads passed through the electric fencing.

After the alterations, a vehicle would go through a set of twin gates something like an airlock. The outer gate - made of strong bars and backed by electric fencing - would open, allowing the vehicle to pass it and enter a small section of road surrounded by strong bars and electric fencing. Once the vehicle was through the outer gate, that gate would close, then the inner gate - built to the same specifications as the outer gate - could be opened and allow the vehicle to descend the ramp.

To open either gate took '2 factor authentication', meaning it had both a fingerprint scanner and a keypad for entering a keycode. They figured that such systems were designed to keep places secure from humans & so should be completely immune to accidental access by an animal.

The only way an animal could conceivably defeat such security was by main strength - just forcing it open. So they built it with that in mind - using thick metal bars, and then testing it by using construction machinery to batter on the gates using the levels of force they'd measured the animals exerting. Nothing passed that test until it successfully resisted three times as much force as the dinosaurs had ever been observed to use.

They also worked on securing the ramps, mainly by removing sections of ramp - at least 2 sections per ramp, though it depended on the length of each ramp & that depended on the corresponding wall height - and replacing the missing sections with drawbridges. A dinosaur could simply walk up a regular ramp, but with each of these secure ramps they'd have to get past 2 or more missing sections of ramp somehow.

Each drawbridge was disabled until someone used the fingerprint scanner and keycode successfully, then disabled itself again after the vehicle's weight moved off of it.

And the drawbridges were a 'failsafe' design, meaning that when the drawbridge was not is use, it was not raised up, but lowered down instead - down into the gap, not down spanning the gap.

A raised drawbridge could happen to fall down if certain parts failed, and that could result in the gap being spanned and accessible.

But these drawbridges hung down into the gaps. That still left the gap unbridged, but it also meant that no part could fail and enable the drawbridge. Unless a continuous force was being exerted by machinery, the drawbridge would fall back into the gap, leaving the gap unspanned again.

At the base of each ramp, they put a 'cattle-guard' designed and sized for the kind of dinosaurs that lived in that paddock.

The concept of a 'cattle-guard' is simple, and anyone from a rural ranching area - like the badlands where Doctor Grant often had his excavations - would be familiar with it. It is simply a pit or depression covered with a row of bars, spaced so an animal's foot can pass through the gaps between the bars, but a car's wheels can span the gaps unimpeded.

They are commonly emplaced on road-entrances or where roads cross fence-lines, and where you don't want cattle to enter the road.

Any animal attempting to cross one quickly learns that his foot can pass through, and, not wanting to break a leg, they back off and leave it alone. Vehicles simply drive across.

Cattle guards save time compared to opening and closing gates.

In this case, they added an extra measure of defense - one that worked whether or not there was electric power or other support.

In a couple cases, the foot and leg size of the dinoraurs living in a particular paddock happened to coincide too closely to the size of a jeep wheel. Those paddpcks still got cattle guards, but would simply be serviced by Amtracks rather than by jeeps. The tracks on an Amtrack could span very wide gaps with no trouble at all.

Then, because they believed in multiply redundant systems, they added landmines - not the usual kind that explodes - but something more like a Hollywood special effect landmine. Instead of blowing up, these used compressed air to expel a large cloud of pepperspray.

Landmines are commonly set to trigger for a certain weight range and ignore others.

Antipersonnel mines will trigger when something about the weight of an average person steps on it, but they ignore things with the weight of vehicles. And anti-tank mines trigger only in reaction to the weight of a tank.

These can be fine-tuned to account for a number of variables.

So on each stage of each ramp, they emplaced mines. These were set to go off only when something the weight of the kind of dinosaur living in that paddock stepped on them, then spray up a large cloud of pepperspray to incapacitate any dinosaur trying to get up the ramp. For the paddocks containing dinosaurs that happened to weigh about the same as their jeeps, those paddocks would use Amtracks as service vehicles instead, since an Amtrack's weight was totally unlike a jeeps and would therefore not set off the mines.

And, if needed for some unanticipated reason, an Amtrack could carry an entire jeep in its passenger compartment with room to spare. It was not an ability they expected to need, but the Amtracks were built that way, so it was an option, just as their amphibious abilities were not expected to be needed, but could turn out to be useful.

In testing the mines, they found they had to back off a step.

They'd started by taking what data they had - how much pepperspray it took to incapacitate a grizzly bear - then scaling that up.

But, when they tested that assumption, it was lucky that they had the veterinarian on hand.

Dinosaurs turned out not to have respiratory systems as advanced as most of the more current life forms on the planet.

pepperspray, among other effects, restricts the airways in humans, bears etc.

In dinosaurs, it restricts those airways too much.

The veterinarian got there in time with assisted-breathing gear, so the test animal - a Hypsilodontid - was saved.

Research turned up the following facts.

pepperspray is commonly sold with many different strengths, measured in at least 3 different ways. CRC - which stands for Capsaicin and Related Capsaicinoids - is the only one which has USA federal government requirements, so they decided to use that one. Those requirements specified, for bear-deterrent peppersprays, at least 1% CRC and not more than 2% CRC. But peppersprays available for personal defense uses range from 0.18% up to 3% CRC.

Even that measurement varied, as there are 6 different types of Capsaicinoids with different properties and levels of irritation.

But they found that a variety of the weakest type available - the .18% CRC stuff - that worked on dinosaurs as you'd expect it to work on humans - it incapacitated them.

They decided on a phased approach where the lowest levels of the ramps would have a dinosaur-incapacitating level of pepperspray, which they called D1 pepperspray for ease of reference. But the ramp levels closest to the wall - the levels that they could not imagine the dinosaurs ever reaching, had a dinosaur-killing level of pepperspray, which they called D2.

Similarly they altered the overpressurized compartments on the Amtracks, so the pepperspray they released when attacked would only incapacitate dinosaurs, not kill them.

"Killer Row" - the row of predator cages, also got pepperspray landmines on the approaches to the gates through the electric fence, and covering the entire space between the electric fence and the outer fence. If predators got out, there were D1 landmines - some set for the right weight range for each predator - ready to incapacitate them.

So as not to interfere with regular maintenance workers, many of these landmines - the ones on the paths to the gates - were inactive while connected to electric power. That way, while the electric fences were on, the landmines would not detonate and inconvenience maintenance workers or the veterinarian. But if power went off, they each had a little electromagnet - delayed via capacitor like usual - that would let go of the safety and thus arm the mine.

Workers could still get peppersprayed if they strayed off the clearly marked safe path onto the always-active mines. It was clearly marked because it was meant to catch dinosaurs, not humans. Dinosaurs can't read, so they can't tell a sign that warns of mines from a sign that talks about their habits or care and feeding needs.

In addition the Jurassic Park team bought some teargas grenades for general use. But testing on those showed them to always be lethal for dinosaurs - their simpler lungs just couldn't handle the potent chemical concoctions. They kept a few for emergencies, but for most of them they swapped out the teargas, replacing it with D1 - the incapacitating level of pepperspray.

They tested everything else while they were at it - electric stun-guns, electric fences, the rubber bullets they'd bought for the .30 caliber machineguns and so on.

Being hit by a rubber bullet is like being hit by a baseball bat wielded by a major league player - they have similar amounts of raw force.

Most animals receiving such an impact will leave - not knowing what happened, but knowing it hurt and they want it not to happen again. For example, a Great White shark can be made to break off an attack and desist by punching it in the nose.

But even a huge dinosaur full of rage, which might shrug off or ignore one or two such hits, will either leave or be beaten to death by 600 such hits per minute - the rate of fire of their .30 caliber machineguns.

Their ammunition supplier had also come up with something like a paintball round where they could fire a small capsule of pepperspray at a dinosaur. They had these for the .30 caliber machineguns, as well as for the 105m howitzers.

And there were more special rounds for the 105's - one that delivered a flash-bang grenade, and another that was like the bean-bag non-lethal round available for shotguns. This bean-bag round was much bigger than a shotgun's, would definitely make any dinosaur take notice, and had a chance of breaking their bones. They had two types, each with reduced propellants - one much more reduced than the other. They needed reduced propellants or they'd be lethal despite being bean-bags - enough force can break bones and cause other trauma just like being hit by a car.

They also stocked armor-piercing ammunition for the machineguns and high explosive ammunition for the 105's, just in case things got really serious. A high-explosive round could be set to delayed detonation, so that it could penetrate some material - like a dinosaur's hide and a foot or two of its flesh - before exploding. That would turn any known dinosaur inside-out.

They hoped it never came to that, but when you can't predict very well, you prepare for the worst.

They'd have liked to prepare more - they had many more ideas - but they were running out of time and money.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Hammond had had 6 months worth of operating capital, and they'd spent 2 months' of that time, plus half the rest of his capital, preparing to open with what they considered the minimum adequate safety measures - the stuff they'd already done.

While the rest of the team had been working on that, Doctor Wu had been busy with other things. He'd had a lot of ideas to look at as far as the dinosaurs' DNA.

First he'd looked at the Raptor's DNA and figured out a way around using frog DNA to fill in gaps. So, with removing the frog DNA, no new Raptors would be able to change sex and breed.

They would be applying that, and other changes, and growing new Raptors from it, as soon as possible.

They considered also applying it to the other predators - the Compys - that used frog DNA and so could breed.

But Compys were delicious, so they'd decided they wanted a steady supply for the previously-unnamed restaurant in the visitor's center, which they were now calling the "Tastes Like Chicken" restaurant. It would serve Compy meat regularly and a variety of other dinosaur meats and eggs as they became available.

Three types of herbivores could also breed - Maiasaurs, Othnielia, and Hypsilodontids - and they'd be served in the restaurant as dinosaurs got culled to keep the total population manageable.

Hammond was planning to auction off the rights to do the culling. There was a category of big game hunters who were rich and would jump at the chance to 'bag' an animal so rare as a dinosaur.

He figured if it needed doing anyway to avoid crowding, why not make some money while you're at it.

To support that, they'd bought a bigger freezer - a Maiasaur weighed 3-4 tons & would take lots of freezer space. Big dinosaurs grew slower than the smaller ones, but when it came time to 'harvest' one, it would last them a long time.

Compys, at just over 2 pounds each, grew fastest, taking 6 weeks to reach a 'harvestable' size, just like the chickens they were sometimes compared to.

Othnielia, at about 22 pounds, grew next fastest, then Hypsilodontids at a couple hundred pounds each.

The herbivores all had plenty of room in their paddocks to grow, but they were looking at ways to expand the growing areas of Compys so they could grow more.

There was some talk of changing DNA in other herbivores so they could breed too, but Doctor Wu was too busy with more important DNA projects at the moment. And, if they wanted other species to breed, they didn't have to use frog DNA - they could simply put together at least one animal with an X and a Y chromosome instead of the usual 2 X's.

But even that would have to wait - Doctor Wu was also working on security and that had priority.

He was effectively working on several ideas at once. He had the ideas and solved any big problems, while his teams did most of the rest of the work.

The first 2 ideas to be completed were about an allergy and an enzyme.

Allergies to shellfish had been known, and studied, among humans for a long time. Doctor Wu had found how to add that allergy to dinosaur DNA, and he was confident he had it set to the right level, where a small amount of shellfish would just give the dinosaur a rash, but a shellfish-oil concentrate would put it into anaphylactic shock.

Such a measure would be very helpful in emergencies. Concentrated shellfish oil was not a naturally occurring substance, so would pose no risk normally. But if they got out, the island could be crop-dusted with it and any level of emergency fixed thereby.

Secondly, he'd found a way to back up the lysine dependency. That dependency had not come up during the Nedry Disaster, since the disaster hadn't lasted long enough for the dinosaurs' need for lysine - which was like a special form of starving to death - to come up.

Since then they had tested and found that it worked - the animals could not manufacture their own lysine & so had to eat Lysine-fortified foods to stay alive. But some foods are naturally high in lysine and those could, theoretically, allow the dinosaurs to last long enough to be a problem if they got out and ate nothing but those foods.

So they'd wanted to back that up somehow and had found a way.

Acetyl-leucine does not occur naturally. It is manufactured as a medicine. But if you knock off the acetyl group, acetyl-leucine turns into leucine - an amino acid necessary for life.

Doctor Wu had come up with a way to code, into the dinosaurs' DNA, a stomach enzyme that broke down leucine into its component parts. With that in place, dinosaurs could not consume naturally occurring leucine and get any more value out of it than from, say, sugar. It would not supply their need for leucine. And leucine was not an amino acid they could manufacture.

Another enzyme in their intestines could break down acetyl-leucine into the acetyl group - which would simply be digested like other food - and leucine.

So, with this DNA change in place, the animals had to be fed acetyl-leucine every day or they'd rapidly get get severe cerebral ataxia - the inability to voluntarily control their muscles or balance.

This would both be faster than the lysine dependency, and safer, since it was not a need the animals could fill on their own.

A dinosaur twitching on the ground is no threat, yet can still be saved by the right injection. It seemed a perfect fit.

Meanwhile, the veterinarian had been busy too.

All their predatory dinosaurs had large nasal cavities, into which he was surgically placing 'cortex bombs' - except the very young Raptors, who were not developed enough yet, and the Compys who were not dangerous enough to warrant it. These were small explosive charges that could, when detonated, blast the animals' brain into jelly, killing it instantly.

They had worried about how to set them off. Any kind of transmission could be mistaken - there were many types of wireless transmissions and they didn't want one of those to accidentally execute their dinosaurs.

Besides, they preferred 'passive' systems - systems that worked automatically on their own without any need for someone to turn it on somehow. That way if electric or radio systems failed or some similar problem occurred, their security system would still work.

RFID chips were the answer. These are the same chips which are sometimes put under the skin of certain pets so they can be identified if they get lost. You never have to change the batteries in those, since they get their power via induction from being scanned.

So they set up their cortex bombs the same way - they'd constantly be 'scanned' by short-range transmitters in the cages. That would give the cortex bombs a constant stream of power which would power a tiny electromagnet and capacitor. The capacitor would run the electromagnet for a brief time if power was lost, but when that ran out, the electromagnet would cease holding the safety switch and the bomb would explode. It would not be a big enough explosion to escape the animal's skull, but would still be plenty to kill it.

If power was lost, or the predator moved far from its cage, nobody would have to worry about it rampaging anywhere.

Since they didn't want these to go off accidentally, they fed power to the RFID 'scanners from multiply redundant power systems such as are used in computer datacenters. Two different power sources, backed up by a generator and the kind of battery called an "uninterruptible power supply" would all have to break before the RFID 'scanners' would turn off.

So the predators would be safe in their cages. But if they escaped and went very far from the scanners, they'd fall over dead.

With that, it was time to open Jurassic Park for business.

What they'd done so far had taken all the time they could afford to spare - Hammond's capital was running out and needed more income from the Park to bolster it. He was a rich man, but there were limits to that.

They considered their work adequate so far. But they wouldn't stop building additional security measures as they were able to. It was risky to open without all their desired security measures in place, but only about as risky as driving for a couple months without car insurance - you did it if you had to and, most likely, it worked out fine.

In preparation for opening the park, Hammond had issued press releases and standard things such as that.

And the visiting scientists had released preliminary study results.

But, for the most part, nobody believed any of it.

They assumed it was all some kind of joke or hoax.

They 'knew' dinosaurs were extinct and so would not consider the question at all.

It might have been a problem, except for Ian Malcolm. He'd become obsessed with trying to get Jurassic Park shut down. So he released a constant stream of warnings, attack ads, etc.

His vehemence and fervor on the subject made it worthwhile for the major news outlets to cover it. They prefer to run anything 'eye catching', and the more extreme the better. And Malcolm, in his frenzied attempts to keep people away from Jurassic Park, was judged 'newsworthy'.

Once the major news outlets ran their Malcolm-inspired anti-Jurassic-Park stories, most people, by and large, did what they usually do with whatever the news outlets tell them - they uncritically accepted it, with an attitude along the lines of 'if the news says it, it must be true'. There were exceptions of course, but many, if not the majority, operated that way.

That got them to believe the dinosaurs actually existed.

Then the aspect of human nature that insists "it can't happen to me" took care of the rest.

So when the park actually opened, it sold out.

Actually selling out was a bad measuring stick in this case, because Hammond had bought all his own tickets, then re-offered them for sale on Ebay via various dummy accounts and corporations.

He explained to his staff that folks would scalp the tickets anyway, effectively marking them up from the reasonable initial price to one that was as high as the market would bear.

While he was at it, he rhetorically asked what right miscellaneous anonymous scalpers had to that markup if he could manage to claim it instead.

So Hammond collected all the highest bids folks were willing to make, and his Ebay ticket sales sold out too.

It brought in quite a bit of money and took a load of worry off of him.

So on opening day the park was filled to capacity.

All day long, there was a continuous conga-line of LVTP-5's, spaced a half mile apart, traveling down the viewing trail which went around the dinosaur paddocks. Each had its passenger compartment absolutely full of tourists, plus one more - who paid extra for the privilege - riding in the spot for the 3rd crew-member. That was otherwise unused, since a driver and gunner was all the crew which the vehicles really needed.

And plenty more people hung out near the predator cages, other displays, restaurant and gift shop.

Hammond was like an expectant father - trying to be everywhere and check on everything at once, while worrying that things were not better. He'd wanted the park to have top-notch levels of opulence and refinement, but that would have taken another year.

So a lot of things were at functional levels rather than luxury levels.

The LVTP-5's traveled on dirt roads rather than paved roads, for instance.

But that was good enough. They were designed for that anyway.

The day passed in a whirlwind of activity, with happy tourists everywhere taking pictures and buying mementos.

The gift shop, back when Doctors Grant and Sattler had first visited the island, had been filled with the same kind of cheap & inaccurate, low-quality, stuff that you could already get in plenty of other locations - inflatable plastic dinosaurs in only vaguely the right shapes and in bright primary colors, for instance.

Both Doctors had suggested, and Muldoon had concurred, that, since the park was unique, it should have gift shop items to match.

So a certain number of new offerings had been made, using what materials they already had on hand.

Leather from Compy's, dead Raptors & any other dinosaur which had died for any reason, had been tanned and used to make things. Similarly they'd cleaned what bones they had, especially teeth and claws, and hired crafters to make things from them.

The gift shop offered purses, wallets and other goods made from real dinosaur leather.

They had various bits of jewelry and art made from real dinosaur bones, such as necklaces of teeth.

Some dinosaur bones, especially skulls, they just cleaned & preserved & sold 'as-is'.

They made plaster casts - as well as some in brass - of dinosaur footprints, dinosaur teeth, dinosaur eggs, and even whole skeletons or skulls from dinosaurs that were small enough. These too were offered for sale, alongside accurate models - built to scale and made of quality materials - of every dinosaur in the park.

Models were offered to different scales, and they made sure to have several the right size and set-up for kids to use as rocking horses.

They used the same size to make 'pedal cars' for kids - where a kid could get in through a cutout on top, sit down as if driving a car and pedal his dinosaur around like a car, steering it and playing a recorded roar instead of beeping a horn.

They offered sets of to-scale, accurate dinosaurs made the same way rubber duckies are made and to be used for the same purpose - as bath toys.

One subcontractor came up with a way to add fasteners, which were something like Legos, to the inside edges of dinosaur eggs. They chemically stiffened the eggs - using something a lot like lacquer - so they could survive repeated use, and then offered these as unique storage boxes. They could store small items, be opened and closed multiple times, and even be used as a sort of a 3d puzzle. These were offered with a small plush dinosaur - accurate in scale, shape, and coloration - inside.

They sold recordings - both audio and video - pictures, posters, & standees - life-size for some and scaled down for others.

They sold remote-control dinosaurs in many varieties - life sized ones of Compys, Othnielia, and the little Segisaurus , and scaled models of others.

They had whole sets to the same scale as each-other. Some were made of the things you usually make remote-control cars out of, but a few - mostly Compys - were really high-end and were made using actual bones as framework and actual dinosaur leather as coverings.

They even had several truckloads of bagged "Dino-Poo' brand fertilizer ready for sale to plant nurseries and other such places once the word got out.

The high-quality gift shop items sold very quickly - even at the high profit margins Hammond was offering them at - and Hammond took the opportunity to re-fill the shelves with the low-quality stuff he'd had before and sell it off.

He also spent a good part of the day arranging contracts to keep the gift shop full of the good stuff in the future.

He was was still busy with that well after closing time and so missed the attack.

Not all their visitors had come to see the dinosaurs.

Some had come to free them.

A party of 3 animal rights activists had pretended to be tourists, yet had actually been checking out the cages, electric fences etc.

They had hidden near the visitor's center when it was time to leave. After Jurassic Park closed, they emerged and went to 'Killer Row' - the row of cages where the 4 predatory types - Tyrannosaurus Rex, Velociraptors, Dilophosaurs, and Compys - were kept.

They picked the locks in the outer fence then cut the buried power lines leading to the electric fence and passed through it too.

Then they quickly set explosive charges on the cage locks and detonated them, releasing the dinosaurs.

They hurried away as fast as they could, but their activities had attracted the T-Rex to come and investigate. The small shaped charge on his cage door wasn't big enough or close enough to bother him when it went off.

And he was a lot quicker than the activists had planned for. He rapidly bobbed his head forward and got one of the activists, then settled down in place for a moment to chew and swallow.

The other 2 activists freaked out at the death of their comrade, causing them to pause briefly. They had not expected any such results, assuming they were quick enough to get away before the dinosaurs reacted.

That pause gave the Dilophosaurs enough time to poke their heads out of their cages and spit poison into the activists' eyes, blinding them.

The Dilophosaurs, always cautious especially when the T-Rex was near, slowly began to come out to eat their now helpless prey.

The first one out of the cage didn't make it far before it slumped over dead - it's cortex bomb had detonated as designed.

The second one out did the same.

After that, the remaining 4 Dilophosaurs stayed in their cages. They didn't understand what exactly was happening or why - they just used the same instinct that keeps mice away from a reusable mouse-trap which they've already seen kill a mouse. They knew there was some incomprehensible danger and stayed away from it.

Huddling in their familiar and safe cage, they survived.

The Raptors - still very young at just 2 months old - and the Compys, had reacted too slowly to see the 2 Dilophosaurs slump over dead.

When they exited their cages, they saw only fresh meat in the form of 2 dead Dilophosaurs, and 2 blinded humans, one of which had tripped and hit his head.

They showed no further hesitation.

The Raptors surged out and began to nibble their food - both that which was immobile and that which was still moving.

They were already well-fed, but they were cat-like in their desire to hunt for the joy of hunting.

The Compys, not being such as to hunt for pleasure, ran for freedom.

In doing so, they triggered pepperspray landmines and were all disabled.

It wasn't long thereafter when the Muldoon and the park's maintenance crew arrived, well-armed with flash-bang grenades, pepperspray grenades, tranquilizer guns, and real guns.

They disabled all the dinosaurs, rescued the activists, and repaired the damage.

The activists were given first aid, then rushed off to a hospital on the mainland via helicopter.

Only one lived long enough to reach the hospital.

The staff of Jurassic Park was up late having meetings discussing how to prevent such a thing from happening again.

During those meetings, Hammond assured them that this incident would not ruin the park - that the country and laws which had jurisdiction over John Hammond Incorporated were unlike those of the USA, where you could break into a house, hurt yourself doing do, and sue the owner successfully. Rather, the laws governing John Hammond Incorporated specified that if someone hurt themselves during, and because of, the commission of a crime, it was their own problem - nobody else was liable.

The park opened again the next day as if nothing had happened.

But they were frank and open about what had happened, figuring the information would come out anyway.

They still sold out and made plenty of money.

Apparently folks figured that the park was safe if it could withstand even deliberate attempts to bypass its safety.

And the news would have come out anyway, because the surviving activist did indeed try, and fail, to sue.

Meanwhile they were working to improve their security.

There were simple and cheap things they could do right away, while saving up and preparing to do other things later.

So they set up a series of grenades at each predator cage. These were all suspended - from the cage ceilings and the fences - by electromagnets, and set up so that, when power was lost, a series of capacitors would start draining, each resulting in a different delay before its associated electromagnet let go of that grenade.

The first grenade to be released - only a few seconds after power was lost - would be a flash-bang grenade. This would stun the dinosaurs, and also alert anyone who didn't already know, that there was a situation which needed addressing.

Next, after a delay calculated so that the dinosaurs would not quite yet have recovered form the flash-bang, a D1, or incapacitating pepperspray grenade would drop and go off.

pepperspray kept dinosaurs incapacitated much longer than flash-bang grenades did - up to 45 minutes compared to just over a minute for flash-bangs.

And if power had not been restored by the time the D1 pepperspray was about to wear off, then the final grenade would be released and detonated. This contained D2 pepperspray - strong enough to kill the dinosaurs. They judged that it was better to have them dead than rampaging on the loose, and if nobody had acted during that 45 minutes to prevent such a rampage, then the D2 grenades would be needed.

They were confident that the D2 grenades would never be triggered - that there would always be folks on hand to fix any problems within that 45 minute delay. But they wanted the D2 grenades there as backups just in case.

They had completed that installation, and had a few days of booming business, when an unusually strong storm hit the island - so strong that they had to close for a day, since it would be unsafe for anyone to travel to and from the island.

The storm dropped vast amounts of water, and blew down several trees, some of which fell onto electric fencing and thereby disabled some sections.

There was so much water that some of the moats filled to the point where curious dinosaurs swam across them.

But they could not scale the tall concrete walls on the other side of the moats, and had no space to stand in-between the moat edge and the wall. So as the waters receded, they were stranded at the bottom of their moats, which were too tall to climb out of. They wandered around in the moats, which encircled each paddock, and were still there when cleanup crews arrived with tranquilizer darts and cranes, to put them back into their paddocks

The downed trees were cleared just as easily, and the electric fences repaired as well.

The park was back in business in very short order.

Very soon, they bought 24 more LVTP-5's and had them refurbished and altered just like the first set. The park had been at capacity every day for weeks, so they wanted to expand the capacity. More LVTP-5's was the quickest and easiest way to do so - they just spaced them every quarter mile along the touring path instead of every half-mile as before, and suddenly they had twice the capacity.

And as far as expanding capacity went, they really needed more space for housing and raising Compys - there was huge demand for them in the Tastes Like Chicken Restaurant, especially since chef O'Brien had come up with his new dish: "Compy in Poison Sauce", which was a major hit.

On first hearing, you'd think that it would be aimed to appeal to the same crowd who ate Fugu - the crowd that likes risk.

But in fact, the poison used in the sauce - the Compy's own poison - was too weak to do any real harm to anyone in any circumstances. At worst they may be a bit tranquilized and get a rash. But even that was avoided entirely by including some antihistamines in the sauce.

Compy in Poison Sauce sold well because it it had an amazingly good taste. Compy's themselves were tangy and delicious, but the sauce magnified that. Some folks get really excited about jalapenos, some others about curry, many folks are excited about chocolate - with some few dissenters - and so on for many other types of spices and flavors - they don't appeal to everybody, but they have great appeal to a certain group. But if anybody failed to be thrilled about the flavor of Compy, they had yet to speak up - such a group may not exist.

The name "Compy in Poison Sauce" also probably appealed to certain types of people - since it sounded risky and daring.

So, lacking any groundbreaking ideas on where to put a Compy farm, they, uh, broke ground.

That is, they dug a pit a hundred feet deep and as wide and long as a football field. They lined the 100' walls, and the floor, with thick concrete, and added a 'ceiling' of steel bars backed by electric fencing - not that they thought Compys could fly or climb that well, but just in case there turned out to be some as-yet undiscovered ability these animals had.

Then, so that tourists could look in on the animals safely, they put, around the top of the pit, walls 20' high and made of 2 inch thick bulletproof Lexan. With those suitably braced, folks could walk right up to the edge of the pit and look in with no chance of falling in. There were ranks of coin-operated telescopes for them to use too.

The Lexan also made it harder for the animals to escape should they turn out to climb like geckos or something similar - climbing up a concrete surface is different than climbing up a sheer slick Lexan surface.

For human access, they had ladders and elevators.

The elevators were mostly open platforms for maximum visibility. They had several security measures. They used numeric keypads so the right code could be entered to activate them. They had fingerprint scanners which only worked on fingerprints - at human body temperature - of people in the security database. Dinosaur claws are not remotely at human body temperature, nor did they have any real chance of holding even a severed finger to the scanning plate for long enough - immobile the whole time - to get a good scan.

And lastly the elevators had a small key that had to be held in a rotated position - against the resistance of a spring - or the elevator stopped. Dinosaurs haven't got manipulatory digits capable of such movements, even if they somehow got the knowledge of what they needed to do.

And at the top of the pit cage was a very strong door that needed a key to open, with a similar one in the 'ceiling'. A skilled human - with lockpicks - could perhaps pick it, but dinosaurs did not use tools nor study lock tumbler mechanisms.

The ladders just went up the sides of the walls, since dinosaurs seemed incapable of climbing those - they were just not shaped right for it. But just in case, each had a series of keys that had to be rotated correctly, one this way and another that way, according to printed instructions next to them - if it wasn't done right, sliding plates slid out and covered all the ladder rungs which were higher up than the climber.

Both the ladders and the elevators had 'emergency buttons' which you could push to get a brief blast of pepper spray directed to various likely points. These had printed directions next to them with a numeric keypad, with the correct code listed in the directions.

So humans, who can read, could blast incapacitating pepper spray at any dinosaur 'catching a ride', in any place it was possible for them to do so.

And each ladder and elevator also had locked, though accessible, weapons cabinets in case of emergency.

Automatic peppersprayers were set up encircling the walls of the pit at 3 heights, set to go off when triggered by either electric eyes or tripwires. To disable the electric eyes for 30 seconds, the right code must be entered.

To disable the tripwires for 30 seconds, a clockwork mechanism had to be wound.

The sprayers needed no electricity to run. They operated by simple gravity-feed when triggered.

Feed chutes were installed in the walls. These were only 2 inches in diameter, and vertical for most of their length, so it seemed extremely unlikely that any dinosaurs could use those to escape. But they were electrified through parts of their length, just in case.

And the same kind of chute was installed - with the addition of vacuum pumps - for waste removal.

Long ago John Hammond had had a 'self-cleaning' swimming pool, which really meant a normal swimming pool with an extremely simple 'robot' that swam around randomly, trailing a hose which sucked in water, filtered out any contaminants, then replaced the water.

So he commissioned a company to make him a similar robot for cleaning the football-field sized dinosaur pit. It was armored and would move around in a way something like a roomba, though with stronger motors so it could drag its cleaning hose behind it.

The cleaning hose would suck in any waste and send it to the other end of the hose, where it would be collected for composting and, later, sale as fertilizer.

In between cleaning runs, the robot would 'dock' in a small closet - just big enough to hold itself and too short for dinosaurs, even Compys - and plug its hose into a small pool of water, so water would be sucked up and clean the entire length of the hose.

Just in case any dinosaurs crammed themselves into the dock anyway, certain parts were charged like an electric fence, as were certain strips on the robot's outer surface.

In case there were things that needed cleaning which the vacuum hose did not do a good job on, remote-control water cannon were installed around the pit's perimeter, 10' above the floor, which could hit any part of the cage floor with streams of water at up to firehose levels of force.

These would also be useful for security, such as clearing dinosaurs off the elevator platform if the need arose.

The new pit cage worked so well for the Compys that they built several more, both as space to farm even more Compys, and as more secure places to keep the other predators. Due to gravity, the heavier the predator was, the better the pit cage worked.

When they moved the Dilophosaurs to their new pit cage, they discovered that the bars of their old cage has suffered some corrosion. Testing determined that it was because their saliva was somewhat acidic.

So the damaged bars were tested and replaced as necessary, and the bars of their cages, old and new, were coated in enamel, which is unaffected by most acids, including the acid in question.

Here was an example of the unpredictability of largely unknown life forms. Yet even if the problem had remained undiscovered until the bars had completely failed, their excess of caution would still have prevented disaster, since the Dilos could not have gotten through their Lexan outer cage.

Moving the predators to the new pit-cages freed up their old cages.

Since they didn't want to let that investment go to waste, they started a program of rotating other dinosaurs - especially the popular types, like Triceratops and Stegosaurus - through the cages. Each would stay in a cage for a couple of days - where it could be easily viewed by tourists - before being returned to its paddock.

Dinosaurs were only moved to or from the cages while in a tranquilized state, just in case.

The cages could also be used, at need, for dinosaurs which needed to recover from injury or illness.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

About this time they discovered a new need - protecting clueless tourists from themselves.

A tourist, desperate to get pictures of himself up close and personal with a dinosaur, had managed to get through the various barriers and out into a dinosaur paddock.

The paddock in question was full of Gallimimus - a 26 foot long herbivore similar in many ways to ostriches. They would not normally be a threat, but this tourist was being obnoxious in his attempts to get close to them. He spooked the flock of dinosaurs and caused a stampede, which he chased, still taking pictures.

He was lucky, because, by the time the stampede met a barrier and turned back the way it had come, straight at him, he'd been spotted and his exact coordinates had been fed to a fire-support Amtrack. So before the stampeding flock got to him and pounded him into bloody mush, a 105mm pepperspray round had screamed in from 5 miles away and detonated within 15 feet of him.

That was close enough to fully enclose him in a cloud of pepperspray, which caused the flock of dinosaurs to veer off to avoid the gas which was so noxious and irritating to them.

So the man survived, though after the maintenance crews retrieved him, he was still miserable for a couple hours until the pepperspray wore off.

Staff discussions on what to do to prevent such problems in the future had real trouble coming to a conclusion. As opposed to humans, Dinosaurs are comparatively easy to contain.

In the end, cynicism won.

They had legal protection, since the laws governing the country where they were incorporated, and therefore holding jurisdiction over them, disallowed lawsuits for things resulting from crimes you were in the act of committing. So folks trespassing in areas they were not supposed to be in could not sue them.

And they already had a system of barriers that nobody could accidentally stumble past - it took a determined effort to bypass them.

So in the end they simply put up informative signs and joked amongst themselves about 'evolution in action' - suggesting that anyone foolish enough to break in and provoke dinosaurs was in the act of demonstrating 'survival of the fittest'.

Or in other words they figured that their responsibility to protect people from themselves was limited, and that they'd already adequately covered that need.

About this time, they lost a Parasaurolophus - a kind of Hadrosaur 10 meters long and known for the large long curved bony projection extending upwards and backwards from its skull. It had been too adventurous in exploring the cattle-guards at the base of its ramp - its foot had gone down between the bars of the cattle-guard, and, startled, it yanked it back and broke its leg.

Over time, most of the other dinosaurs had approached the cattle-guards, decided that they didn't trust the uncertain footing, and wandered off. Some had put their feet down, felt them slip between the bars, and simply pulled them out again with no damage.

But this Hadrosaur had been both unusually adventurous, and particularly easy to startle. They could have saved it, if it hadn't tried so hard to yank its leg free. But as it was it tore an artery and bled out before the veterinarian's tranquilizer dart took effect.

At least the various scientists were happy for the extra chance to autopsy a real dinosaur. They learned many things from it.

And the freezers at the Tastes Like Chicken restaurant would be full for quite a while - it would take a long time to use up that much meat.

That gave them a great opportunity to 'surge' their production of Compys - now that they had extra room in the pit cage to grow more, and demand in the restaurant could be mostly satisfied by the Hadrosaur.

So they greatly slowed down the harvest rate on the Compys, and hatched as many new ones as they could, both naturally and artificially.

While they were at it, they built a second pit cage to hold Compys, just for the extra room.

Most of the time, nobody had to visit the Compy pit cages - feeding and cleaning happened without humans having to go down in. Workers only had to go in to the cage for harvesting and veterinarian visits, and for those visits, full suits of chainmail - covering from head to toe - had been provided. For such visits to the other predators, the animals were simply tranquilized from a distance before anybody went in. But the Compys were so numerous that such tranquilizing would take a lot of time.

At the same time, the Compys did not have natural weapons capable of harming somebody wearing chainmail - their teeth were too small and their jaws too weak to damage someone despite such a suit of small interlocked metal rings.

Chainmail suits, plus clear visors, would probably also be adequate protection from the Dilophosaurs, but they still tranquilized them anyway.

The workers who had been collecting 'harvested' Compys for the restaurant had simply been walking among the Compys in their chainmail and ignoring them. At first the Compys had been tentative and cautious of contact with the humans, then they went through a phase where some individuals would charge forward and bite. These individuals always failed to achieve anything & sometimes hurt themselves trying. Those Compys soon learned from personal experience, as did the rest by watching, that attacking humans was pointless and likely to hurt.

So then they left humans alone - neither attacking humans nor fearful of them.

Later there was an additional change - as people and animals grew familiar, they stopped paying as much attention to each-other. That, in addition to the large numbers of Compys being 'farmed', led to several incidents where a human ended up kicking a Compy which had wandered, unnoticed, beneath his feet. This was a minor inconvenience for the human, but a major assault as far as the Compy was concerned. It didn't take too much of that for them to learn to fear humans and start keeping their distance, as much as possible.

On the bright side, having Compys fear humans was a good thing - it made it far less likely that humans would ever be attacked by Compys, even if they got a chance.

So, despite the name of 'killer chickens' their Compy farms had fewer dangerous incidents than typical mink farms. Mink could be ferocious and aggressive, and were about the same size as Compys and about as well armed. But you never hear about whole towns, or even the farms themselves, being savaged by escaped mink. If they escape at all, they simply run and hide.

They were just finishing the 2nd pit cage for Compys when the next major incident occurred.

Just after 2am one night after a rainy day, a small freighter approached their dock, docked with it, and started unloading some pickup trucks.

Jurassic Park staff tried to contact it by radio, to no avail.

Once 4 pickup trucks were unloaded, the small freighter disgorged almost 2 dozen heavily armed men, who ran to the trucks and got in, pausing only to shoot the loudspeakers by which the Jurassic Park team were then attempting to contact them.

But the Jurassic Park staff had not been idle - as the 4 trucks started down the road towards the visitor's center, several Amtracks were in motion as well, leaving the parking garage and taking up firing positions, while 2 advanced down the road to meet the invaders.

That meeting was not a friendly one.

The moment the Amtracks came around a curve and into view of the oncoming pickup trucks, the invaders opened fire.

Most of the invaders jumped off the pickup trucks and took up prone firing positions near the road. They poured a hail of fire from AK-47's into the 2 Amtracks, but achieved nothing, since Amtracks are armored to resist 'small arms' fire. But all the ricochets looked impressive.

Some tried throwing grenades at the Amtracks, yet had no real effect, since Amtracks are armored to resist near-misses by artillery, and mere grenades paled in comparison to actual artillery.

But 2 of the invaders were armed with RPG-7's - rocket propelled grenades designed to take out such targets as armored personnel carriers.

These fired as soon as they could - there was a brief delay while they sought a position where their comrades would not be killed by the backblast when they fired - and both hit the lead Amtrack, blasting holes in its armor.

An Amtrack, like other armored personnel carriers, is dangerous mainly because of the troops it carries. It has it's own machinegun, but that is far less effective than the aggregate firepower which its troops can bring to bear: even for a small APC that can carry only around 8 troops - less than a quarter the number that the Amtracks could carry.

So the RPG gunners fired at the most dangerous part of the Amtrack - the troop compartment - which happened to be empty in this case, since none of the Jurassic Park staff was trained as soldiers. Not yet.

Two of the pickup trucks had been set up as "technicals", which meant that somebody had mounted a machinegun in the truck bed. Both of those also fired at the Amtracks. One was a standard .30 caliber machinegun and just 'dimpled' the armor - making many dents & getting partial penetrations where the bullet would lodge in the armor, partially sticking through to the other side, but not flying all the way through.

The damage these did was really just cosmetic.

The other pickup truck had a .50 caliber heavy machinegun, whose slugs had no trouble penetrating the Amtrack's armor.

It stitched a line of holes up and down both passenger compartments, and then aimed for, and tried to take out, the Amtrack's machinegun turrets, which were both shooting back at it. The .30's would have easily taken out the .50 caliber gunners, except the .50 also mounted a thick metal plate as a gun shield and its gunners were hiding behind that. Hiding like that was significantly impairing their accuracy, but keeping them alive.

During this time there had been 2 extra explosions which went largely unnoticed amidst all the other firing and grenade detonations. They were ranging shots for the 105mm howitzers deployed near the visitor's center. After the 2nd shot had clarified the aiming conditions, Doctor Grant - spotting for them in the 2nd Amtrack - called for a full 'stonk', where all of the artillery tubes would fire together in a concentrated barrage - in this case 3 rounds each, after which they'd evaluate and continue if needed.

Doctor Grant wanted a "time on target" salvo where the shells were fired at different trajectories calculated so the earliest shots would arrive at the same time as later shots, but his crews had not been trained for that. So he settled for a more standard barrage.

The battle suddenly changed when twelve 105mm high explosive shells arrived. All the invaders stopped shooting as they tried to make themselves into the smallest possible targets, clinging to the best cover they could, to avoid being hit. The pickup trucks proved not to be good cover for long - they got progressively shredded as successive shells tore chunks off. The invaders who clung to dips and folds in the ground fared better than those at the trucks.

While the next 2 salvos arrived, the invaders redoubled their efforts to get the most out of whatever cover they had.

In the quiet moments after barrage stopped, the invaders ignored calls to surrender and instead jumped up to run into the woods.

While they were up, the 4th salvo, assisted by the .30 caliber machineguns on the forward Amtracks, caught them and did great damage.

The fight was over - only wounded invaders were left, plus 2 who were too scared to resist further.

As the smoke cleared, an anonymous snarky staffer - apparently a former grocery store worker - broadcast on the radio for a "cleanup on aisle 5".

In questioning the invaders, they learned that they were Somali pirates, who'd sailed much much farther than they'd ever raided before, in order to steal some dinosaurs, thinking that they'd get rich quick that way.

Then while the Jurassic Park staff collected the invaders' weapons - the ones that still worked - to add them to the Parks arms locker, Muldoon and Grant assaulted the cargo ship, using plenty of flash-bang grenades to clear spaces before they entered them.

The first grenade stunned 3 pirates who'd been hiding in ambush.

One of the staff commented:

"Those flash-bang grenades work really well."

"That's why we have them," was the reply while the pirates got tied up.

"But why do they all have Jurassic Park stickers on them?" the staffer pressed.

"It's tradition." Muldoon wryly commented as he descended into the ship.

They discovered 8 freighter crew chained up below decks. They freed them and asked them questions too, while waiting for Costa Rican ambulance and military helicopters to arrive and sort things out.

The surviving pirates went to hospitals or jails while Costa Rica decided whether to keep them in jail or deport them.

The freighter crew went back about their business, glad to be freed from the pirates who'd captured their ship then kept them on as slaves to sail it for them.

Then, to improve their sensor network in case such a thing happened again, the Jurassic Park staff shopped for, and bought, a number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - small flying drones about 4 feet long with a payload of about 6 kilograms - for patrolling the offshore approaches to the island. They were set up to carry a set of cameras and radios, plus 2 grenades each - flash-bangs by default.

That shopping turned up some other interesting ideas, so they bought a few bomb-disposal robots as well, figuring they could use them in any dangerous situations that arose - robots didn't feel pain if, say, a Raptor jumped out and bit them from ambush.

They set these up to deliver grenades at need too.

The captured .50 machinegun would go in a tower to be built specially for it above the visitor's center, in case of future need.

The 2 Amtracks had been damaged - one more so than the other, and were sent to the island's repair shop for repairs.

The RPG's had not actually done much damage - their shaped charge warheads channeled much of the explosive force into pencil-thin jets of extremely hot and energetic gasses. Those punched pencil thin holes all the way through the Amtrack's armor, and spattered some melted metal around. They'd have done more damage - blasting much bigger holes and sending much more armor flying around like shrapnel - if the explosive charges were not shaped charges.

But, as before, the park itself experienced no disruption in operations due to the incident. Two Amtracks were down for a while for repairs, but they had spares.

The park had another incident soon after that, when the main electric generator for the island sputtered to a halt, quickly followed by the backup generator.

The problem was found to be contaminated fuel sold to them by an unreliable contractor.

The bad fuel was pumped out of both fuel tanks, which then got partially refilled with fuel from the Amtracks' supply, which was stored and maintained separately.

The disruption was less than an hour.

No dinosaurs escaped since, even without electrical power, metal and concrete were still barriers, as was gravity. No dinosaur suddenly learned to fly over the walls containing it, just because the electric fences were inactive for a while.

The tourists on the Amtracks almost didn't notice the power outage - the dinosaurs still roamed their paddocks and the Amtracks still worked in all respects, with the exception that the security system briefly stopped feeding them information on where to look to see what kinds of dinosaurs.

The control center operated on battery power during the outage, though they had to shut down non-essential systems to make that last long enough for the generator to come back online.

The tourists watching displays in the visitor's center were disappointed as those displays turned off for lack of power. But it was daytime so they just walked outside and joined the crowds watching the caged dinosaurs nearby. When the power came back on, everything was instantly back to normal.

It was an odd coincidence that the next security upgrade to come after that power outage was dependent on power.

But it had been 'in the works' and they proceeded with it, even in the knowledge that power could not always be guaranteed.

They had wanted for a while to upgrade their security systems - they had 92% of the island under motion detectors, but 100% of it under surveillance by video cameras. The motion detector gaps were largely because the river gave regular 'false positives' to any motion detectors pointed at it.

So no motion detectors were pointed at the river.

But, after experimentation, they found that they could mount motion detectors at the river pointing away from it, and get everything from each riverbank outwards. That dropped the uncovered area to just the water itself.

That was an improvement. But the real upgrade was that they'd finally saved up enough money to go ahead and emplace infrared detection units over 100% of the Park.

That would give them more abilities to keep track of the dinosaurs in cases where, for example, one was unmoving due to sleep or sickness.

While they were at it, they added a number of phone units all around the island - hardwired phones using their own landlines and battery backups which could still be used to contact help if needed, even when atmospheric interference made radios unreliable, as it had during the Nedry Disaster.

And, because sometimes only a radio would do, they added more several repeater stations - to receive, boost, and re-transmit radio signals - so they could still use their radios even with a certain amount of atmospheric interference.

There had been a lot of discussion about the idea of using shock collars - such as dogs get, to keep them contained, or keep them from barking. The technical challenges with it were manageable - such collars could be scaled up to shock dinosaurs as hard as a Taser would - but nobody could think of when and how it would come into use. Whether power was on or off, there were enough other security systems in place that nobody could think of a scenario when the collars would be depended upon, or even used.

So they shelved it as a good idea to be looked at if they needed to.

Meanwhile, the Maiasaurs had been breeding like rabbits - and the park staff should know, since they'd briefly farmed rabbits for feeding the predators. They'd stopped farming rabbits when folks complained about cute and fluffy things being fed to the dinosaurs - people tend to feel attachment in proportion to adorableness. So they'd stopped raising rabbits, and changed over to raising ugly animals instead. They favored emu, which are easy to farm, have an excellent feed conversion ratio - 2.5 pounds of feed to 1 pound of gain - and are very ugly. Very few people can feel attachment to emu from sight alone.

Compys were omnivorous, so rarely got fed meat. Mostly they got cat food or dog food - whichever was cheaper at the moment.

Since it was time to cull the Maiasaur herd, Hammond had auctioned off some 'hunting licenses' to the highest bidders. Each license was very specific - it let you shoot and kill one very specific dinosaur, under the supervision of the Park staff. Hunters were not allowed to stalk through the park and possibly disturb - maybe even get trampled by - the other dinosaurs. Instead they would be driven to a spot on a road, from which the security system indicated the dinosaur in question could be seen. They would shoot from the road and the Park staff would collect the carcass, from which the hunter could take whatever souvenirs or meat he liked. The rest would go to the Tastes Like Chicken restaurant, or to the handcrafters who made things for the gift shop.

There were 3 animals to be culled at this time. The first 2 'hunting experiences' went smoothly, as planned.

But the third one was a rich man who'd never handled a gun before. They gave him some training - as much as the arrogant and impatient man was willing endure. It wasn't as much as they'd have liked, but since it seemed adequate, they went ahead with the hunt.

It started out smoothly enough.

An Amtrack carrying the hunting party - the rich man, the spectators he'd brought, and supporting Park staff - drove to a suitable location - in this case a service road inside the animals' paddock, since that was the only spot from which the animal could currently be seen and the hunter was impatient - and the staff set up, on the roof of the Amtrack, a table for the hunter to use as a 'bench rest'.

There was a good view from the Amtrack's roof and it was reasonably secure as well - at need they could quickly take the man back inside via any of several hatches.

The rich man took the gun he was provided, aimed it, and fired.

But he had aimed impatiently, so he only wounded the Maiasaur, which started charging around and trumpeting loudly in its pain.

That reaction caused the rich man to drop his gun, leap off the Amtrack's roof, and run, which wouldn't have been a problem except the wounded Maiasaur also caused the other nearby Maiasaurs to stampede.

They happened to stampede right towards the Amtrack and the fleeing hunter.

It could have been a problem for the hunter if they had not had the right tools on hand. The Amtrack itself was just as safe as if it was an enormous rock - animals don't body-slam those if they can avoid it.

The Amtrack's .30 caliber machinegun sent a burst of armor-piercing bullets into the wounded dinosaur, chewing it into hamburger before it even had time to fall over dead.

Then as the stampede approached, they calmly switched ammunition belts, and fired a stream of rubber bullets at the oncoming Maiasaurs - giving them all a couple of hits and then focusing their attention to whichever one was in the lead at the moment so the rest of the animals could see.

It didn't take them long to turn the stampede in the other direction. Being swatted by a rapid series of sledgehammer blows - but only when they went a certain direction - was a lesson any animal could quickly understand.

They would call out the veterinarian later to check the bruised beasts and give them any attention they needed. They didn't expect they'd caused any broken bones or other serious damage, but it would be prudent to have it checked.

In the meantime, they collected the formerly-arrogant but currently subdued hunter and took him and his friends back to the Parks' hotel.

He'd had other immediate plans, but had suffered a "brown alert", as the park staff liked to call it, and needed to go change into fresh pants.

After that, they were more careful about who they gave hunting licenses to - the auctions for the licenses started clearly stating that anyone not complying adequately with the Park staff's directions would lose his license, which would instead go to the next-highest bidder.

Soon thereafter, Hammond gave in to pressure to 'loan out' a dinosaur to a standard zoo, and sent a Segisaurus to the San Diego zoo.

It was both a marketing effort, a goodwill offering, and a way to make more money - since he charged that zoo for the privilege and negotiated a portion of their proceeds during the dinosaur's visit.

The Segisaurus seemed like a good choice: that type looked like classic dinosaurs, yet were small - averaging only 15 pounds - and were easily controlled.

The effort did not go well.

At first everything was fine and the Segisaurus drew big crowds, then it rapidly sickened and died.

An autopsy revealed that the beasts primitive lungs could not handle modern pollutants - not even the relatively mild pollution levels in San Diego.

They would run carefully controlled tests in Doctor Wu's labs, but early indications, at least, were that the beasts could not survive in mainland zoos - they were located in cities, and the cities were too all polluted.

Meanwhile, the Park's infrastructure was expanding.

Isla Nublar was more or less surrounded by mountains, and Hammond envisioned a series of mountainside hotels where folks could stay and look - from abundant balconies equipped with telescopes - down onto the dinosaurs many hundred feet below.

He wanted to build a monorail-equivalent servicing those hotels and using the old electric land-rovers - he hated to let things go to waste.

And, while he was thinking about all the extra tourists they could accommodate via observing the dinosaurs from above, he recalled an old favorite - the Skyway gondola ride at Disneyland.

Such a cable-car type of arrangement could greatly increase the Park's capacity - with strings of gondolas constantly passing above each paddock, all full of paying customers.

So he had construction firms bidding on doing all those things, while simpler projects of all types - like expanding the current hotel and strengthening all buildings against possible dinosaur attacks - were already being worked on.

They continued to gain knowledge about all their dinosaur types - from both serious observation and study, as well as from less formal contacts - and as they learned, they started looking at the possibility of making a paddock just for Compys. That would give them tons of room to farm them, and demand was high.

In the meantime, to expand their capacity, they built 2 more pit cages for Compys.

The football-field sized pit cages - being much bigger than regular cages - allowed the dinosaurs more freedom of movement. So more types of dinosaur behaviors occurred and could be observed & thereby, more could be learned about them. The pit cages were also much more tightly controlled than paddocks, and so safer. So they'd keep using those while still studying and learning.

As far as 'less formal contact' went, the least formal was when the dig team - the young people formerly digging up fossils for Doctor's Grant and Sattler - discovered that Stegosaurus were very placid, like cows, and did not object to contact with humans.

They wanted to start a 'petting zoo' with Stegasaurs as a centerpiece, but the jury was still out - such an animal could easily kill people if startled or annoyed. So, for now at least, such contact was limited to the dig team, all of whom had to sign waivers - if they wanted to continue such contact - acknowledging that they knew the risks and accepted the responsibilities and possible problems that went with it.

The exuberant youth expected that further studies would prove their 'steggies' safe and, in anticipation of that, had already designed a kind of saddle for it, where a seat something like a hammock was slung between the rows of vertical plates on the 'steggie's back.

They tested it too - quickly before anyone could tell them not to - and it worked. Several of them could ride at once in such hammock-saddles.

They were strongly admonished not to take more such risks, but were allowed to continue their 'steggie rides'.

Discovery often entails risk - many of the pioneering aviators died in the early days of flight, yet much was learned from their efforts. So, while everyone was concerned and tried to help them avoid any problems, the 'steggie kids' were also respected for being willing to take risks for the sake of knowledge - even if it was fun while they were at it.

The most exciting news was that Doctor Wu's latest genetic modifications now seemed to be working.

He'd gone though a couple of versions to get it right, but was confident about the latest versions.

New animals of all types were being raised which included the acetyl-leucine dependency and the shellfish-oil allergy in their DNA. And the new version of Velociraptors included no frog DNA, so, since they used female DNA - two X chromosomes - they should be unable to breed.

Extensive tests would be conducted, of course, to make sure everything worked as planned, but tests so far had all passed.

In this batch of Raptors, he'd also included genes for a weak heart, so if they got too excited - like they would if they broke free somehow and hunted humans - they could expect heart attacks. There would be warning pains and physical weakness before any fatal attack, so they shouldn't lose too many. But they wanted to keep as safe as possible while their knowledge of the animal was still imperfect. In later batches, - once they knew more about controlling the animals - they could remove the genes for weak hearts, possibly replacing it with something else like diabetes or Down's syndrome if they needed to.

He was also looking into making a batch with severe asthma - Raptors couldn't chase anyone if running made them wheeze and maybe even pass out.

He wanted to raise both batches at once so any differences between them could be studied.

Older animals would all be culled as the new animals reached a sufficient age to replace them.

The new animals were a few months along when the next incident occurred.

One of the workers in the dinosaur nursery had reported that a young raptor - of which she'd been particularly fond - had died during the night.

But in fact, she'd smuggled it off to her apartment to raise as a pet.

She, like much of the staff, did not want a long commute from the mainland, so stayed in a growing village on the island.

She kept her new pet raptor secret, and it worked out ok for her for about a month.

But one evening - as near as they could determine when they pieced things together later - the maturing raptor, while nuzzling her neck, gave her a playful nip that was perhaps stronger than he'd intended - or perhaps not. They were a particularly vicious type of animal.

In any case, her partially eaten corpse was discovered in her apartment when she didn't report for work the next day.

Right next to her corpse was the body of the young raptor. It was still alive, but it lay twicthing and helpless from lack of leucine - unable to control either its voluntary muscles or its balance.

They could have injected it with leucine and saved it, but instead they put it down, both for study and so it could not teach its man-eating ways to other dinosaurs.

Autopsy showed it had in fact had a mild heart attack. This suggested that any excitement for it was mild and over quickly, which in turn suggested that it did indeed like its caregiver and was probably playing and surprised when she bled out through her severed carotid artery - surprised, yet still happy to feed given the opportunity.

Yet, while the raptor had recovered from its mild heart attack, it had been disabled by the lack of acetyl-leucine - the young ones grow quicly & so need it more often.

For preventing this kind of thing from happening again, all the warnings they needed were the pictures of the scene. They could have done lectures and required training events, but the pictures spoke much more powerfully - nobody wanted to take such risks after seeing them.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Not long thereafter, the anniversary of Jurassic Park's opening came, along with the many special celebrations planned to go with it.

The park was absolutely packed.

The spare Amtrack's were all in use doing extra tours, and all the public spaces were full of visitors enjoying various special events and giveaways like free ice cream.

As it turned out, not all the visitors were happy to see the Park succeeding. Several had come hoping it would fail and planning to help it fail.

They were animal-rights activists, and were prepared both mentally and physically to do a lot of damage in an effort to 'get the message out there'.

They'd been getting ready for a long time and so had managed to get some people in place on the staff of Jurassic Park.

That had allowed them to study the safety measures, learn the best points for attack, and smuggle in a large quantity of explosives.

In an instant, the island-wide celebration, involving crowds of happy people enjoying plenty of treats and prizes both great and small, suddenly changed into something deadly serious, as multiple large explosions simultaneously breached many fences and walls, took out the main and auxiliary power generators, wrecked the Park's control room, and destroyed other security features like the .50 caliber machinegun tower.

Just after the explosions, one of the Park's jeeps - with a stick jamming its accelerator and the steering wheel tied in place - crashed through the Lexan barrier around the Tyrannosaur's pit cage. It smashed the Lexan and fell into the cage, but stopped when it hit the bars forming the cage's ceiling. A moving jeep carries a lot of force behind it, but the bars were very strong - having been designed to stop 15 ton dinosaurs in case they showed unknown abilities.

So the jeep rested on the pit cage's ceiling while other events happened around it.

Close after the jeep came one of the Parks' truck-mounted cranes. It pulled up next to the breach by the T-Rex's cage and deployed the crane.

While the crane was deploying, some activists got off the truck carrying a big bundle. This they tossed down into the cage. It unrolled as it fell, and so spread out onto the bars which comprised the ceiling of the cage.

Then they ignited the bundle.

It was a pattern of thermite ropes designed to melt the bars and create an exit.

It worked as designed, making a large opening through the bars and the - currently unpowered - electric fencing next to them. Sections of bars fell down into the cages, but they hit nothing - the animals had moved away from the unknown but dangerous-looking new phenomenon

As the melted ends of the bars were cooling, they repeated the performance at the pit cages containing the other predator types, though they had more time - the T-Rex was expected to take longest, being by far the biggest - and so used explosives instead of jeeps to breach the Lexan barriers.

Soon, the other truck-mounted crane drove up to help - the activist driving it had been delayed by his first job - blowing up the control room.

Then the activists - who seemed to have a timetable worked out - went to the cages that used to form 'killer row' but which, since the advent of the pit cages, had had a rotating schedule of occupants for display purposes. There they used more explosives to blow holes in the barriers.

The various herbivores contained therein panicked at the sounds and rushed out in all directions.

Most of the actual tourists near these cages had left the area once the activists' purpose had become clear.

A few curious ones had lingered, but these ran off when the herbivorous dinosaurs rushed out of their cages. The humans and dinosaurs, mutually fearful, avoided each-other while the dinosaurs ran into the woods to hide and the humans ran into the visitor's center.

The activists ignored them all - they were busy with their efforts to free the predators.

Each crane lowered a special net - baited with meat - into a pit cage. One went into the T-Rex's cage and one into the Dilophosaurs' cage.

The T-Rex, unafraid of anything, walked right into the net - which was set up something like a cast net - to get the meat. It was quickly sealed in tight, whereupon the crane carefully lifted it out.

The Dilophosaurs - ever timid - would not approach their net. To no avail, the activists used up the time which they had allotted to Dilos. Then they switched their efforts to the Raptor's cage and fished some out the same way they'd brought out the T-Rex.

Seven Raptors had hatched the day of the Nedry Disaster and they were the only inhabitants of that pit cage. The activists fished out 4 of them, then ran out of time. More than they wanted to free the dinosaurs, they wanted to be sure to have time to get away.

Meanwhile, the crew that had fished out the T-Rex used special poles to stay out of T-Rex's reach while fitting a collar around its neck. This was designed to send out RFID 'scanning' signals and so keep the cortex bomb from exploding.

The T-Rex completely ignored its new collar.

Having managed that, they started driving their crane truck toward the dock, with the T-Rex still caught in its net and suspended from the crane.

Meanwhile, another group had descended into the Compys' pit cage and scooped a few dozen into cardboard boxes.

They got into a jeep and raced to the docks, passing the 2 crane trucks - one full of freshly collared Raptors still in their net, and the other with its captive T-Rex.

The jeep didn't even pause, as they used a remote detonator to set off the explosives they'd previously placed on the wall of the old Raptor cage - the narrow concrete enclosure with steep sides where the Raptors had lived at the time of the Nedry Disaster. This cage currently contained the newest crop of Raptors - still very young - until their new pit cage was completed.

The activists in the jeep had not wanted to release even very young Raptors until they were in a vehicle already driving away.

Their ability to flee in a vehicle didn't end up mattering at all - the explosion at the edge of their cage caused enough excitement among the new raptors that all died of heart attacks. Their genetically engineered weak hearts could not take the excitement.

Only the jeep full of Compys made it to the docks successfully. They raced away in 2 waiting speedboats - headed for the mainland where they planned to free the Compys.

The first crane truck, meanwhile, had overbalanced and tipped over. It could lift a 15 ton T-Rex no problem - if it's bracing legs were properly deployed first. Without those legs - which it could not use while driving - it was easy to lose stability and tip over, which they had when the T-Rex's struggles hit just the right rhythm, after only driving a couple hundred feet.

That truck rolled onto its side and crashed. It didn't take much damage, nor did the T-Rex, but the net containing the dinosaur tore in the crash.

The Tyrannosaur, sensing the possibility of freedom, increased its efforts to tear the net open using its teeth and claws.

The 2nd crane truck stopped - blocked by the overturned 1st truck.

The activists in both crane trucks got out and made attempts to contain the T-Rex. But their efforts were inhibited by the urgent desire to not be caught in its teeth or claws.

They failed.

With a terrifying suddenness, the remains of the net tore and the T-Rex was free.

All thoughts of activism, freeing animals, and making a 'statement' - as loud a statement as possible - fled and were replaced by thoughts of survival.

Half a dozen activists fled in as many directions, and the gleeful T-Rex charged in pursuit - chasing prey was its favorite game.

Un-noticed by all, the net full of Velociraptors was squirming as the Raptors, working together, steadily made progress at breaking free.

It took very little time.

When they did break free, they turned their attention to getting the irritants - their new RFID transmitting collars - scraped off their necks.

As you would expect with a pack of intelligent animals who were used to working together, any discovery made by any of them was soon imitated by the rest. So it should be no surprise that they all broke free within moments of each-other.

Then, leaving the broken collars, they headed for the nearest prey - an activist hiding under the 1st crane truck.

They made it halfway there before the capacitors in their cortex bombs - now outside the range of the new RFID transmitting collars - ran out of energy, releasing the tiny electromagnets which normally held in the safety pins in those bombs.

The Raptors had been advancing in formation, and they all fell dead in that same formation, with no outward sign of what had killed them - there was just enough explosive to jelly their brains, not enough to make it spurt out.

The activist hiding under the truck had seen them coming and - not seeing any possibility of escape - had already had a 'brown alert'. In desperation, he had been praying for deliverance.

Now he found religion.

He had plenty of time to hide there and contemplate it.

The Park's staff was quite busy with other things.

Just before setting off the explosions, other activists had staged 'protests' to disrupt things generally and get the attention of any Park staff available to respond to emergencies.

Some of them had chained themselves to roads and blocked them in a couple of locations, then thrown away the key to the chains and issued demands.

Others had chained themselves to actual dinosaurs - the types known for being most placid - Brachiosaurs and Stegosaurs: they wanted to 'make a statement', not get killed.

With the Park's security system down, co-ordination of the Park's Staff had to be done by radio, and that amount of radio traffic - all of it urgent - made things even more difficult.

Available staff near the visitor's center had first rushed to clear the roadblocks - the human chains - so that the Amtracks could move freely again. Before they got there, the explosions went off, giving them a host of new priorities.

They now had to keep the visitors safe and round up stragglers.

They also needed to hurry and contain the predators - especially the T-Rex. In aid of that, they really needed to clear the human roadblock nearest the visitor's center so that the Amtrack closest to that could return and help defend it from the rampaging T-Rex.

And they needed to rush to repair the dinosaur paddocks where carefully engineered explosions had knocked down the tall and thick concrete walls, turning them and the dirt and rock behind them into very large landslides which filled the moats and made effective escape ramps for the dinosaurs.

It was a time of rushed confusion and they only had so much staff to go around.

So while one team armed themselves and set about hunting the T-Rex, and another kept the tourists safely indoors and calm, the lead Amtrack cleared itself.

The driver took a welder out of his onboard repair kit and simply cut the activists' chain at one end.

He then attempted to drive around them, but they wouldn't move.

So he carefully positioned his vehicle, then got back out and used the welder to fasten the loose end of the chain to one edge of his bulldozer blade.

Then he - very carefully - rotated his vehicle in place. The activists were dragged relentlessly to the side, but he did it so slowly there were no real injuries, though many got a bit scraped up as they got dragged over the dirt.

Now with the human chain, and both ends of their metal chain, up against the same wall, he got out again and simply welded the free end of their chain to wall near the other end, after cutting it free of his bulldozer blade.

When he was done, the human chain was a small loop from one wall back to the same wall.

Then he simply backed up and drove around the human chain, who could now block significantly less than half the road. The road was wide enough for 2 Amtracks to pass each-other, so this was not a problem.

He arrived, in his Amtrack, back at the visitor's center shortly after the T-Rex did.

The beast had evaded the hunting parties, circled around and arrived back at the visitor's center looking for more prey. It had seen movement through some of the windows and attacked the building.

But the visitor's center had been strengthened with just such an attack in mind.

The T-Rex furiously spent its energy trying to get through the walls, windows, and doors, all to no avail.

The doors were thick steel.

The windows were Acrylic as thick as they use to contain orcas, which are just as big as T-Rexes and arguably stronger.

And the walls were thick concrete.

The visitors who were pressed up against those windows got quite a show.

All of this delayed the T-Rex long enough for the nearest Amtrack to arrive and shoot it.

They used rubber bullets, since they wanted to minimize their chance of hurting any bystanders who might be - for instance - hiding in the trees.

The T-Rex proved to be incredibly durable and - fueled by rage and adrenaline - lasted almost through an entire ammunition belt before it fell over - too bruised and battered to continue standing.

It made an interesting noise - almost like whimpering, but with angry overtones.

The Amtrack gunner stood guard over the T-Rex with the machinegun while the driver got back out with a tranquilizer gun and shot the T-Rex. They hadn't started with tranquilizers since there was a delay before it actually took effect.

Meanwhile a worker had launched a drone and maneuvered it out past the mountains, so it could see the sea and spot the escaping speedboats.

Those boats had traversed quite a distance, but not yet so much that the indirect fire from the howitzers on certain Amtracks couldn't shoot them.

Some Amtracks didn't have shots, due to high mountains surrounding the island being in their way.

Even the Amtracks that did have shots had poor firing solutions - the boats were far away from the flying drone which was spotting them, and getting further since the boats were much faster than the drone. It was optimized for maximum flight time, not maximum speed.

So 105 mm shells rained down around the 2 speeding boats for a few minutes. They managed to take out one boat with a lucky direct hit - blowing it to flinders which rained down over a wide area - before the other got beyond their maximum range, unscathed.

The activists had probably not expected High Explosive shells, but nothing else was available that could stop the boats - flash-bangs and pepperspray would bother or incapacitate the occupants, but, with the controls set, the boats would simply continue on while the occupants recovered.

And they emphatically did not want the dinosaurs loose on the mainland.

They had a deal with Costa Rica to do 'all in their power' to prevent that. Costa Rica had passed a law about preventing dinosaurs from getting loose on the mainland, and had deputized the Jurassic Park gunners to help enforce it using 'any means necessary'.

Having done what they could, they contacted the Costa Rican military about the escaping speedboat full on Compys.

In aid of their deal, they also checked dinosaur counts - kept constantly up to date by their computerized security surveillance system - every night, as well as every time a boat or aircraft left the island, to make sure none were missing. The computer checked the counts too and sounded an audible alarm whenever the count changed.

Meanwhile, the staff and maintenance crews were doing all they could to fix the problems and keep the guests happy.

The herbivorous dinosaurs that had escaped from the cages were rounded up and their cages repaired.

The 3 Velociraptors remaining in their pit cage were guarded, just in case. They hadn't found a way out yet, but they were guarded anyway until their cage was repaired.

The remaining human-chain roadblocks were cleared - the fast way just like the first one was cleared - so the Amtracks could resume moving.

One Amtrack with an ambitious driver had been near the visitor's center on his way back.

He dropped off his tourists, and then sped down to the dock and straight into the ocean. They were called "Amtrack" for "Amphibious Tractor" after all. So he 'sped' along towards the Costa Rican coast at his maximum speed which, while 'swimming' was only 8 mph - about a quarter its usual speed. Soon he realized that he could never catch the fleeing speedboat, but he kept going to try to help with the cleanup whenever he did actually arrive.

Other Amtracks went into the paddocks to use their bulldozer blades to start addressing the ramps of dirt and debris that the collapsed walls had become after the explosions.

That effort would take a while to complete, but at least they could - and did - move the dirt around so it no longer formed a perfect escape ramp.

It turned out they needn't have been in a rush for that - the ramps may have looked perfect to humans. But apparently to dinosaurs they looked, and felt, like treacherous footing almost guaranteed to shift at an inconvenient time and cause broken legs or worse. The dinosaurs had tested them a bit at the edges, then left them alone.

And two Amtracks used their onboard diesel to generate a little electric power, to run the lights in the buildings and thereby allow the visitors to go into their rooms and retrieve there things.

It was anticipated that it would take a week before new generators arrived and all the damage was repaired, including new concrete walls emplaced and backfilled.

In the meantime, current visitors were compensated and sent back to the mainland. The park would stay closed until it was judged that minimum safety levels had been achieved.

It was late that night, after much exhausting cleanup work, before anyone remembered the activists still chained to walls and dinosaurs.

While the staff rushed out to free them, they reflected that, though the activists had been ignored all day, it was justifiable because they got themselves into their predicament & their discomfort should not outweigh higher priorities - seeing to the safety of the tourists and dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park only had so many maintenance workers, and safety issues needed to be addressed before comfort issues, especially since the uncomfortable folks were part of the group that caused the problems & did not need new opportunities to cause more problems while the Park staff were busy.

The activists didn't see things the same way. They'd spent all day in the hot sun, bored, ignored, and thoroughly miserable: subject to hunger, thirst, exposure, and fatigue - all things they'd been willing to suffer...if they'd had an audience. Getting their message heard was important to them, and they could not abide being ignored.

They complained about every thing they could think of, including 'false imprisonment' - as if they had not imprisoned themselves. That charge was especially absurd because they could have freed themselves at any time if they had not thrown away their own keys in order to make the job of removing them more difficult.

But soon they'd be transferred to Costa Rican prisons and could do their complaining there. The helicopters were already on the way.

Last of all came the activists that were furthest away - down in the dinosaur paddocks.

All were dismayed and stunned at what they found there.

Several activists had not survived.

Even though they'd chosen the best-tempered and most placid dinosaurs, that was no guarantee.

Big strong animals are capable of many things.

When a .30 ton Brachiosaur decides that he's got an itch - that human chained to his side - and scratches it up against a big tree, that human gets severely injured - about like being run over by a truck. Left alone all day because no one knew his plight, that activist had expired.

Another one had scratched its itch the way horses do - it swatted the irritant with its tail. That activist died immediately.

Another Brachiosaur had decided to go for a nice roll in the mud to cool off. The human attached to it got crushed to death.

Some stegosauruses - disinclined to roll in the mud due to the defensive plates lining their backs - decided to go for a swim to cool off, and consequently an activist was drowned - his head could not reach the surface while the dinosaur swam along, unconcerned.

A small group of activists had mistaken Apatosaurs for Brachiosaurs, and had chained themselves to the somewhat more excitable Apatosaurs.

The Apatosaurs had become more and more agitated about the things stuck to them which they couldn't shake off. So they tried harder and harder to shake them off, and ran around their paddock for a while before giving up the effort. Those activists were quite shaken up by the experience, but ok, except for one who had not fastened his chains very well and got trampled to death.

But, despite those problems, many activists had gotten through the day intact, though bored, hungry, sunburned etc.

They went to Costa Rican jails like the rest.

Unfortunately the one speedboat with 2 dozen Compys in it had escaped to the mainland, dropped off the Compys, and fled south.

The Costa Rican military - prepared for such an emergency - had used aircraft on loan to the airforce to 'crop-dust' shellfish oil concentrate over the entire area where the Compys could have reached in the time they had.

Then Costa Rican troops had gone in.

They quickly found the corpses of all but 2 of the Compys.

It took them 3 more days to find the last 2 corpses.

Autopsies showed that most had died from the shellfish allergy. The last 2 expired from leucine deficiency - indirectly. That deficiency had left them without voluntary muscle control - effectively unable to move or act - and local predators had found them in that state and finished them off.

Either way, the threat was over.

In a way, the event was a coming-of-age for Jurassic Park - a graduation exercise. It was all over the news, and people in general seemed to think that, if the park could survive such a coordinated assault without casualties - other than those who deliberately put themselves in harm's way - that it must be mature and safe indeed.

Demand for tickets soared.

They repaired everything and got some bomb-sniffing dogs to check everything arriving at the island, to help prevent any further attack.

Then Hammond got back to work coordinating construction. The mountainside hotels, restaurants, monorails, and the cable-car 'skyway' over the paddocks were progressing nicely.

And he had some good bids for making a small airstrip along the south-east coast where the island was fairly flat - it wouldn't handle large jets, but even small planes could travel to and from the island faster than helicopters, or, especially, boats.

And he started looking at starting a second dinosaur park at another island.

Doctor Alan Grant and Doctor Ellie Grant got back to seriously studying dinosaurs, which they could do happily for the rest of their lives.

-The End-

º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`

Author's note:

If you liked this story, you can find more of my stories at:

Easy: ~calculonius

Permanent: u/1104213/

In case the url gets stripped off, that's ~calculonius on the site fictionpress dot com


End file.
